Our 13 year old girl Tess passed away on Saturday, October 7.

I won’t pretend that I haven’t been crying for days, or that it’s been an easy time for any of us. Screw that; everyone grieves, everyone is bereft after the loss of a loved one. What I want to do is write about Contessa Kaleen, and the love she brought into our lives.

In October 1993, while in Houston, I grew a wild hair and bought her “for Arthur”. Of course, I wanted her for myself… but she knew she was his dog from the beginning. I fed her, walked and played with her, but Arthur was hers, and she his.

Her first act upon arrival in Miami was to fall into the pool. We looked out the sliding glass doors and there stood a shaking, sodden, puppy with eyes the size of dinner plates. We have no idea how she made her way out, but it should have spoken volumes to us about her tenacity.

Yes, her medical bills cost us thousands. Yes, she tore the chair and couch to shreds while a puppy and yes, that was entirely my fault. I had to learn about crate training the hard way.
Other than that, Tess was very respectful of material things short of youngest daughter’s troll collection. She and YD were playmates, companions, so Tess thought that YD’s toys were hers as well… she’d butt her head into the bureau, make the trolls fall and take off with them. It was a game for fuzzy face, but her playmate didn’t see it that way.
Shortly after she turned 1 everything seemed to click for her and she turned a blind eye to the furniture… but not the trolls.

She took it upon herself to be the Guardian of Everything. That included the house and everything in it, as well as the humans living there.
Alerting us to pagers going off, toilets overflowing… anything out of the ordinary got her attention and thus was brought to ours. She was smart enough to know what was ‘ordinary’ and what wasn’t.

Gator had excellent taste in people. It continually perplexed us that she never liked one man in particular. Never. We found out later that he was not the person we thought he was…in a big way… and learned to trust her good judgement. Arthur had a friend in Texas that Tess just never warmed to, so I was always leery of him.

Though she would never hesitate to defend her people against evil with every fiber of her being, Tess loved harmony and always sought a peaceful solution to any discord. If a disagreement erupted between two of us, whether it was the kids or Arthur and I, she got in the middle. Placing her body between the offenders, she’d tell both of us what she thought… which was: “break it up!”. After we figured that out, Arthur and I had a lot of fun with her, mock boxing. She didn’t like that, either, but was on to us pretty fast that it wasn’t for real.

Some collies love children, are drawn to them, in fact. Not Tess. She loved the kids that she knew were family, but other than that would avoid them like the plague. That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t stand perfectly still and let them pet and compliment her, but the looks that crossed her face when a toddler threw his arms around her neck and lay his face against her fur in bliss were almost comical.
Actually, she loved hugs from her people. In her later years she accepted hugs as treats. Every time we walked in from being outdoors, she stopped exactly 3 feet in so I could bend down and give her a big hug, after which she’d grin and go flop down somewhere.

Zoe came along when Gator was 5 years old. To play with the tiny little dog, Tess would lie down and only move her head, and occasionally a paw. Zoe was like a snake, everywhere and nowhere at once with lightening speed. I saw her do vicious things; ripping at Tess’s delicate ears with those puppy teeth, chewing on her tail and jumping all over the Collie’s belly like a circus acrobat. Tess took it all in stride and treated Zoe with tenderness; after all, the little snake was now one of her charges.

Very sensitive to our emotions, we swore she could read our minds. Part of her job was to give emotional support, and she was glad to do it. She sought out whoever was down and simply turned herself over to them. She did not like to lick people, but if she saw tears she felt compelled to dry them. More than once my tears turned to laughter because I buried my face in her brilliant white ruff or felt the roughness of her tongue trying to dry my eyes.

How do you measure intelligence in a dog? The ability to reason, to draw conclusions and come up with answers to problems? Tess had all that and more. She learned commands, including hand signals, easily, and loved to “work”, which was what I called our training sessions.
And never forgot them, even after years.
Last week I asked her to ’speak’, something my sister-in-law taught her when she was four months old. She remembered.
Each time we moved I’d take her for a walk around the new place, showing her the property line. After that she never deviated from it, staying within her jurisdiction.

Not a random barker, she ‘talked’ to us. Every murmur carried an economy of purpose, and if she had something to say, we listened.

Tess knew how to use her long nose. Sticking it in my neck to wake me in the morning, ramming it into someone’s crotch or behind…

The sweetness of her nature was apparent in so many ways. YD rescued an injured bird, and Tess was very concerned for it, keeping watch lest the cat get in and snatch it up.
She loved our property in central Florida; we had half an acre for her to ramble around in, and her favorite thing was to lie very still under an oak tree and watch the squirrels. Not to hurt them, not at all; I’ve seen her wait until one was inches from her face, then scare it away because she couldn’t control the wagging of her tail.
Here in closer quarters she liked to lie in the front yard and watch people walk by, flipping her tail up in greeting.

In her old age she stopped spinning while she played, couldn’t hear anymore and walked a little slower. Blinded with love, we saw none of that, maybe to her detriment.

Beloved, an esteemed member of the family. A Collie. Just a dog.