Shortly after my father, Joseph Anthony Gerard Morrissey, passed away in 2009, I discovered three handwritten diary entries on loose A4 sheets. He had already typed up and published many other entries on a Slovakian website, which is unfortunately no longer online.
I do not know who wrote these pages or how to trace the author,
so I am sharing them here to finish what he started.
If you have any information about these entries or recognise who might have written them,
please get in touch by leaving a message or sending an email.
Enjoy reading.
Dog Adoption, Dubrava Style; or, The Shanghaiing of a neighbour by the village Press Gang
I have previously mentioned that after virtually every Christmas, one or two dogs are abandoned in the snow on the lane to our village. Their ex-owners, tiring of their Christmas pets, having no interest in the long-term responsibility of owning and training a puppy, and with their children back at school, simply drive up to our village and unceremoniously dump their dogs like so much Christmas wrapping.
The village, again as previously mentioned, has an extravagant collection of dogs, and this is an eyewitness account of how this heterogeneous pack came to be.
Last week, a little puppy was found abandoned, freezing, and starving to death—its ribs starkly standing out—trapped deep in a roadside snowdrift. It was found by a good neighbour and was temporarily given to us to feed and warm up. We have, for unknown reasons, by far the warmest cottage in the village. It was very affectionate and desperately anxious to please, though, as we soon discovered, completely un-housetrained—which, whilst speaking volumes about its original owners, kept us busy.
The next day, the finder of the puppy and some friends came round to discuss what was to be done with it. Most of the permanent residents are animal lovers. Between the half-dozen of us in our cottage that morning, I calculated that we had a grand total of five dogs (most of them abandoned outside the village), four cats, five goats, and three sheep. I have lost count of the chickens and rabbits, which count for eggs, meat, and cash, and are therefore not counted as pets. The former all answer to individual names and are fed by hand. Oh, I forgot: there are a few million bees, who clearly 'know' their keeper.
