Hope Springs Eternal
 

     HopeWhen I tell people that adopting an eight week old Golden Retriever puppy was the most rewarding and fulfilling thing I have done in my life, most people do not believe me that is unless, they have one of their own. We brought Baby Hope home at eight weeks of age, and knew she was special from the get go. We wanted our first adopted golden to have stimulation and a friend. Darwin hated Hope the minute he lay eyes on her. For the first two months he went out of his way to avoid her until one evening which I will never forget. My husband Eric called me softly to tell me to look over the balcony down at the living room. Darwin was in what I refer to as "the universal play position," his ruffled bottom in the air and his front end crouched down. It seemed that he too was under this little dog's spell.
     Hope would not sleep the night in her crate and when she cried, I took her in my arms and slept with her at my side. I felt a bond with this little creature that overwhelmed me. She had been rescued from a terrible situation and was not expected to live the night she was pulled out of a back yard breeding nightmare. We knew she had lived through such horrors her first six weeks of life and Eric and I decided we would do anything possible to give this little girl (and her brother) the lives they deserved.
     Eric and I had begun discussing getting out of New York City and finding a home in the country for our Goldens. We put a years time frame on finding someplace tranquil and conducive to raising two big dogs. The only place we had to exercise and socialize Hope and Darwin was across the street form our apartment at Battery Park City. There our babies and hundreds of other dogs met to play on a fenced in macadam surface roughly 20 x 15 yards.
     I remember saying to Eric one day shortly after we got her, that I firmly believed that Hope was going to give us the impetus to get out of New York and start anew. Never in our wildest dreams, when we both set out to work on the morning of September 11, 2001, could we have known how that fateful day would forever change our lives and bear out what had at the time just been a dream.
     On that morning, Hope and Darwin were on the 17th floor our apartment building one and a half blocks south of the World Trade Center with all the windows facing the towers open. What happened in the next 24 hours is frankly an entire book, and is hard for me to revisit sometimes. I was north of Manhattan when the tragedies occurred and Eric in midtown. We both tried to rush home to the dogs when word of the first crash came.
     Without cell phones, it took hours for us to join up, and when we finally did at Eric's office, we knew that the fate of our dogs was hanging in the balance. We simply had no information to go on, and did not even know at this time if our building was even standing. I think anyone reading this can understand the fear, horror and shock we went through not knowing. We went into "ground zero" on foot that night to try and see how bad it was and get as close to our "home" as we could. We were like extras on the set of an unscripted horror movie. We were able to see, across the West Side Highway the building two doors to the north of ours badly on fire. However ours looked unscathed. We systematically tried to get up streets to our home and were turned away each time by National Guardsmen. We spent a fitful night at friends and went in again on foot at first light the next day. I had a terrible feeling about the fate of the only thing that mattered in our apartment, Hope and Darwin. Against their better judgment the national Guard allowed us to go in. In the smoke and rubble and up a17 story climb, found our anxious hungry and confused babies waiting for their parents.
     Since the island was in lock down and we were homeless, we took them on a rush hour subway to Grand Central Station the morning of the 13th. We would learn later that we had been on the last train out of the station before a bomb scare shut down the terminal. Hope and Darwin were taken to my Mother's house in Massachusetts. Eric and I ended up being in a hotel of 14 weeks. What had happened to our city and our home was unthinkable, being separated from our dogs was untenable. We were adrift in a sea of uncertainty and depression and all we could think of was getting our dogs and our lives back.
     One weekend, we took the train to Virginia and rented a stone farmhouse. We simply could not bear being away from the dogs and things were not looking good for ever moving back to our building. Plus we had decided we never wanted the dogs to have to go back there. It is hard to describe the rainbow that awaited us here in Virginia. We picked up the dogs on December 18th and drove south to our new lives. Since both Eric and I had been city dwellers for so long, building a fence for Hope and Darwin was a challenging task. But we did it! We now take an hour ever day at noon and all play outdoors together. Just now, I returned from a one hour hike with my girl who turned two this past August. We went way up into the wood and were serenaded by birdsong and the sound of acorns falling. My husband's and my bond has deepened with these incredible dogs since now we are at home with them every day. Who would have ever dreamed that such a happy ending could exist after such a tragedy, but it did.  



Entry written by Nan Schramm, Purcellville, VA

 


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