All of the plants in my Japanese garden were frozen solid. The sky was an ice-blue and that was bad news. When it’s sunny here in winter, the temperature DROPS. The air was very still and the ice was thick. No birds were in the sky and all had fallen into a deep silence.

I trudged out to feed Prince whose water hole was holding up. The breaking of the ice that my husband did was keeping enough open water to keep him from freezing to death. Swans have very thick water-proof down which can keep them warm in even the coldest weather. As long as Prince was getting fed, he would survive. And, out of sheer necessity, I became a better bread pitcher during that week.

When Prince saw me he called to me and did an enormous tail wag and wing dance. He looked as excited as a cocker Spaniel seeing it’s owner after a day on his own. He was wagging his tail vigorously and splashing water everywhere. It was good to see he had high spirits amidst being marooned on the ice for well over a week now. He ate heartily and I returned home.

It’s always interesting to me how things that happen in childhood can trigger strong emotions in us later. And we many times we aren’t even able to pin-point the original cause.

That day, my parents were cleaning out a spare room and they dropped off some of my grandparent’s photo albums. These were flip albums from the 70′s and they smelled of my grandmother’s delicate rose scented hand cream. It was comforting to flip through the albums and know by the smell how much my grandmother must have also flipped through them to survey years long gone by. It made me feel closer to her, since she had been gone for 7 years by that time.

Then I saw a picture taken in 1977 and a long-buried memory flooded me.

It was just a simple, yellowing photograph. I was rolling on the grass with my mom’s dog Corky on a summer day just like any other. I was wearing blue patch-work overalls and I was smiling. Corky was smiling too.

He was a pure black dog– half-Scotty and half-cocker. We had rescued him from the pound when I was a baby. Even though he was technically the family dog, he was really my mom’s dog because she was the one who fed him, tended to him, and allowed him to snuggle on her bed at night. Still, I enthusiastically played with him for hours on end. But, he was also an older dog and would sometimes get tired. He’d crawl under one of the side tables in the living room and emit a low growl to let me know he needed some rest. And then I’d be off for other adventures.

The memory that flooded me was of a summer night in 1977. We were living on a rented farm in Ohio while my dad was in his first year of a PhD program. My mom worked 60-70 hours a week at an extremely stressful job in order to pay the bills. She had a very demanding boss and sometimes he would call her into work late in the evening after she had returned home. And she’d have to go whenever he called, or he would threaten her job. He would tell her he could get anyone off the street to replace her in a heartbeat. And she’d leave and make the long drive into town to finish up sales proposals at the radio station where she worked.

That night when she got the call, Corky and I were in the front yard playing. Corky was on a very long chain since that yard wasn’t fenced. It was a hot evening, and my mom, frazzled, came outside and announced she had to go back to work to re-edit some copy and sales proposals. As usual, they weren’t good enough for the chauvinistic station owner who loved to wield power over his staff. I remember feeling my mom’s stress and frustration as she hurried to get into the old Mustang. I asked her to please stay and play with us but she mumbled something about getting fired and slammed the door to her car.

I went back to the house and as I was opening the door, I heard a high-pitched screeching and Corky was yelping in pain. My mom got out of the car and was hysterical. My dad said when Corky saw her leaving, he broke his chain and ran under her car before she even had time to react. My dad was in the farther part of the yard and couldn’t stop Corky in time.

My mom put me in the back seat of the Mustang, and wrapped Corky in a white sheet and handed him to me. She frantically drove to the nearest veterinarian and banged on the door for someone to answer. It was about 7:00pm and they were closed for the evening. She drove some back roads to get to another vet. The sheets were turning scarlet faster than I could think. Corky whimpered and looked up at me with soft, brown eyes. Sometimes he’d let out a huge yelp and sometimes he’d tremble from head to tail. I asked him to please hang on and told him we were getting help. At some point during the drive he stopped moving, and I told my mom to hurry. She pulled over, and looked back. Corky and I were both soaked in blood, and Corky was gone.

I don’t remember how long it took to get home but it felt like an eternity, with limp Corky laying in my arms.

My mom dug a grave at the far end of the property while the sun was setting. Corky lay beside the grave in his sheet. My mom buried him but I refused to look. She came back to the house and we sat on the front steps just as the sun went behind the horizon. She asked me how I was feeling, and I remember crying a little, but then I stopped. I said, “I know that you just buried a shell– just like a sea shell where the owner went away. The real Corky is in Heaven now and he is okay. The Corky you buried wasn’t him at all and I know one day I will see him again, too”. I remember the profound feeling I felt that all life was connected, and that life was infinite, even if I had just witnessed the death of a body. The body was not us, it was simply a house we use here and now, but it’s not the real us.

And that’s all I remember of that evening.

But, after I saw that picture, and after I re-lived that memory in its entirety, I realized that was one of the triggers for my profound sadness when Princess died. And I realized it was the thing that kept bidding me to return to the ice, day after day, to make sure Prince would survive the freeze.

And soon after that, the lake ice slowly melted, until Prince could finally swim freely again. But now, we were back to the problem of finding Prince a mate. He was becoming more and more attached to me as the days went on, but we all knew he needed a swan friend, not a human friend, for his companion.

The two female swans were still hope on the horizon, but the Fish and Wildlife Department started to push back. In fact, they even decided to re-evaluate Prince’s status as being grandfathered in. Prince’s case went up for review, and if he didn’t pass the review, Fish and Wildlife would have him taken off the lake and euthanized.

(Stay tuned for part 9)

- Sarah Polyakov