THE memory you reach for when someone asks “What is your first memory?” is ever changing. I am not sure what came first. Was it the other memory from my Nana Murphy’s farm when we went to collect eggs and she laughing at the chickens who tried to attack me? Or was it running through the lashing rain with my mother shielding me under her coat, when I am half holding her legs and standing on her feet?
Or was it my first memory of my first Jack Russell 'Sancho'? He was a few months old, quiet and sweet. He loved my mother completely. He just sat at her feet while she knit, and he ate the ends of her chocolate digestive and loved drinking her tea when it had gone cold sitting too long in the mug on the floor. I don’t remember his arrival, just his quiet company and love.
And then came Jimmy. He came in a little ball in my father’s coat, to “keep Sancho company”. And Sancho became Sancho and Jimmy. Quiet was gone forever. The two of them immediately became partners in crime, running, jumping barking non-stop. I don’t remember ever walking them, I could not imagine the logistics that might have taken! They just ran together, ate together and barked together.
They got doors open together, not least the fridge door, until my mother put an old cast iron black kettle against it – which my father kept stubbing his toe on. They stole food together, especially if there was a dinner left on the stove top for my father who may have stopped “for a mineral” on the way home from work. They slept on my mother’s lap together as she knit. And drank her tea together.
They were the bad dogs, but very good boys, and their antics set the tone for my childhood memories, and my lifelong love of Jack Russells.I realise now that so many of my most precious memories, from my mother and father to my children, are also peppered with these little rascals.
By complete accident my own children have grown up with Páid, the Jack Russellest of Jack Russells. He is perhaps a "miniature Jack Russell" at only a few pounds and not one foot tall, but his antics and he are larger than than size. He has barked, bitten and run through the past 17 years of our family. With his tiny, neverendingly glorious heart he has expanded ours.
Christmas when Santa's visits were interrupted by Páid escaping. The bloody invasive bamboo planted in a ridiculous place, because of the hole dug by Páid for no reason whatsoever. The communions, confirmations, graduations, birthdays, high days and low days, where Páid is in all of the pictures and memories.
Páid spent the first decade of his life being violently car sick. He just got too excited, anxious and overcome. Then we got a caravan in Donegal and he discovered a new lease of life and a patience of knowing at the end of a journey there is a beautiful place where new and more exciting adventures await.
At 17 he is in his twilight, and we are giving thanks for having him for so long, and are reminding ourselves of yet another life’s lesson he has given us in this life we are so lucky to share with him.
