Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Spinny
my beloved dog as a child
buried in the woods behind our house
back in the days when dogs didn't come inside
the house, no
they had their own house
built by dad, and it was rather deluxe
since dad had those skills
in Virginia along the Skyline Drive
where dad grew up, his dog Jack
lived the same way.......
outside
so I never questioned the arrangement.....
one day I came home from school
third grade
to see workers clearing trees in my woods
for a new house......Bulldozing......I Freaked !
cried out to dad, Make them stop !
What about Spinny ? !
Dad reassured me
I buried him so deep, almost to China
they'll never ever
reach old Spinny....

Heidi, Kelly, Molly, Penny - I grew up with all these dogs, but they were family dogs, not mine. My first dog was Brandy - a black lab mix I got custody of after the divorce. We hiked & swam a lot of miles, that old gal and I. I was into scuba at the time, and dabbling in underwater photography, and have a few dozen shots from below of her & her big, webbed feet. (I really should get all those 35mm slides digitized.) She was so much more than a pet - a surrogate daughter, perhaps. to make up for the real one's part-time status. losing her hurt for months. Even now she shows up in my dreams every so often...

Found a few U/W pix I'd digitized at my daughter's request for a personal portfolio she was putting together. They were done on a very inexpensive scanner and are of low quality, but for now they're all I've got. They show her at age 9 swimming in Laurel Lake.

You can just barely see the dog's tail in the lower left corner of the picture.
   


I showed her how you can walk along the bottom if you hold a heavy enough stone. (That's not a bubble coming out of her mouth, it's lens flare.)
 
 
Me looking up at her looking down at me.
 
 

wonderful pics !

A far cry from your original post, sorry - until after repling, I'd forgotten I'd had a handful of my underwater slides digitized, and hoped that the dog swimming was among them. It wasn't, but I got caught up in the momentum of seeing these again...

Loved this. The family dog was always so much an integral part of the family, even if he/she lived mostly outside.

And o. m. g., those pics! Wow. Amazing.