It’s kind of funny how Wally Morris owned a dog before we did.  It was all part of my efforts to create a character different from me.  I envisioned her as barely five-feet tall, with short dark hair, grown children, a grandchild, in her late forties, and with a black Labrador retriever.  That was all in contrast to me, since I’m tall, with medium brown/graying hair, my kids were in school, I was in my early forties and we were cat people.

I’ve caught up and passed Wally in age, my children are grown (no grandchildren yet, but that’s probably good, all things considered), I’ve started to color my hair, and we’ve had nine Seeing Eye® puppies in this house in the past thirteen years.  Four of them were black Labs, four were yellow (although Misty is a golden/Lab cross, she’s still in the yellow category) and one, as we all know, was chocolate.

I guess it shows how little I knew about having big dogs when I started writing the Wally stories, since I gave her a white carpet.  Sure I called it a don’t-let-the-dog-in-here carpet, but as anyone with two dogs and a cat knows, fur doesn’t stay in one place.  It tends to blow around and gather in corners, becoming a sort of tumbleweed of fuzz.  With a black Lab in the house and a white carpet, Wally would have to vacuum every day.  I’m not even sure she is the type to clean her own house—no one in my neighborhood does, and my neighborhood is a lot like Wally’s.