I met Bimba and her best friend Lola, both rescue dogs, in Agua Amarga, a beautiful isolated village in the stunning Cabo de Gata National Park in Southern Spain. We were looking after them while their owner was away visiting family overseas.
She was cute and quiet and her owner said she’d been mistreated. So how did she become one of the main characters in The Man with the Butterfly Mind?
Driving home from a stock up visit to the supermarket and not coming across a single other vehicle I wondered what would happen to Bimba and Lola, if for some reason, I didn’t make it back.
It’s not a nice thought is it?
The idea persisted (always a good indication that there’s something that wants to be explored). And later wandering over the cliff tops between Burgau and Praia de Luz in the Algarve, Portugal the idea for this story started to take shape.
At around that time I spoke with a friend who’d had a very lengthy surgery and her story of forgetting things and re-learning afterwards, reminded me of another close friend. Her son had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident and been in a lengthy induced coma.
People, me included, thought you had surgery or were in a coma and when you ‘woke up’ everything ‘went back to normal’. It’s not that simple. Sometimes you don’t get everything back, and sometimes you don’t even get close to ‘normal’ back. And given the fact that a lot of us have things that we’d prefer not to remember, I wondered if that happened to me, what would it mean? Would there be things I wouldn’t miss? Would I even know if something was missing? Or would I be able to more easily live in the moment, a bit like a butterfly.
How does a dog write a novel?
I can almost see your eyes rolling. Don’t worry. I’m not going to get all weird and tell you about this amazing dog who points at letters and pictures with her paws. It starts with a different question… What would happen if…
Before going any further, it will help if you know that I’ve spent the last few years traveling around Europe, a good deal
of which has been spent looking after other people’s pets and homes, while they go away. And this story is about the first assignment we did for someone we didn’t know in some way beforehand. Not only that, the assignment was in a foreign country, where we didn’t speak the language and didn’t know a soul. As a further complication, it was in a remote but beautiful part of the Cabo de Gata Natural Park in southern Spain.
Before going any further, it will help if you know that I’ve spent the last few years traveling around Europe, a good deal of which has been spent looking after other people’s pets and homes, while they go away. And this story is about the first assignment we did for someone we didn’t know in some way beforehand. Not only that, the assignment was in a foreign country, where we didn’t speak the language and didn’t know a soul. As a further complication, it was in a remote but beautiful part of the Cabo de Gata Natural Park in southern Spain.
Agua Amarga is a lovely white village on the Mediterranean with extinct volcanos perching along the water’s edge for miles and miles. During summer it is in holiday mode, with cafés and shops open, and people. But we were there in mid-winter. There was hardly a soul around. And it was still a good ten minute drive from Bimba and Lola’s house. The nearest supermarket was a further half an hour away from the village.
Bimba and Lola were our companions. Two adorable terrier types, one black and one golden and we were instantly accepted by them. Which is all well and good, but I’m not a fan of leaving dogs at home by themselves when they’ve just seen off their owners off. The idea of stressing them unnecessarily by choofing off as soon as you arrive, stresses me. I don’t want them to feel abandoned or worried in any way.
Bimba and Lola were also rescue dogs, and even though Lola was adventurous and independent, and probably wouldn’t have worried. She was definitely the boss and definitely did the talking. Bimba was quiet. She didn’t say much at all. In fact I don’t remember hearing her bark. And she wanted to be close to us. She loved nothing more than to snuggle and would wait patiently for her blanket to go on the sofa before hopping up beside you. She also had some little idiosyncrasies, eating her food in morsels away from the bowl and munching them from a corner where she could check her surroundings. Her hooman suspected she might have had a difficult past. More difficult than the term ‘rescue’ already indicated.
While they got used to us, we went on some nice walks together through the rambla to the one thousand year old olive tree, roamed past the peach trees and abandoned roofless homestead, and generally pampered Bimba and Lola till it became necessary to replenish our supplies.
And that’s when the what-if happened. Driving back along the deserted road to the house I had the thought, ‘what if we didn’t make it home to the dogs?’
Not a nice thought, is it?
I realised that people, myself included, thought you had surgery or were in a coma and when you ‘woke up’ everything ‘went back to normal’. But it’s not that simple. Sometimes you don’tget everything back, and sometimes you don’t even get close to ‘normal’ back.
And given the fact that a lot of us have things that we’d prefer not to remember, I wondered ‘what if’ that happened to me? What would it mean? What would it feel like? Would there be things I wouldn’t miss? Would I even know if something was missing? Or would I be able to more easily live in the moment, a bit like the butterflies that were fluttering around the spring flowers on our walk.
One day, after walking back from the beach, I started thinking again about Bimba and what might have happened in her past to make her so quiet and it got mixed up with the other things I’d been thinking about and memories and Bimba’s story started to emerge.
I won’t say it took shape because I didn’t know the story. Bimba started to tell it to me. And I started to write it down. And as I walked the cliffs along the coast with Lucy and Milo, I’d be asking Bimba what happened next.
Of course, I tried not to think about it, but that doesn’t work. I did everything I could think of to alleviate the anxiety, like making plans for the future. Things like having a note in the car saying there are dogs at home, with the owner’s phone number on it. Putting a note in my handbag with ‘dogs at home, call this number’.
And getting contact names and numbers for local help.
All of these things are on my list of must knows when we housesit with someone’s pets now. To me those questions are just as important as knowing who the vet is and how to get hold of them. And I’m thankful that it’s never been necessary to use the information for anything other than peace of mind.
Perhaps because it was our first experience, the picture of Bimba and Lola alone in the house wouldn’t disappear. The idea of what would happen if the owner (or housesitter) didn’t come home, stayed… And later, when we were housesitting in Burgau in Portugal, looking after some other doggies, and walking across the cliffs to Praia de Luz, Bimba and Lola would come to mind and I’d shiver despite the heat.
At around that time I spoke with a friend who’d had a very lengthy surgery and her story of forgetting things and re-learning afterwards, reminded me of someone else. The son of a close friend had acquired a traumatic brain injury in a car accident and been in a lengthy induced coma.
So out of that ‘what if’, Bimba became the storyteller as well as the heroine in The Man with the Butterfly Mind. She made me smile, she made me cry and I enjoyed every minute of my time with her and the people she encountered on the way.
Someone once said if your story makes you cry when you write it then I want to read it. And even now, whenever I pick it up again, I fall in love with Ash and Meko, DrGreg and Mrs B, Lola and my special little friend and story teller Bimba.