Guest Post by Hava: It’s Raining Golden Retrievers

I am pleased to have Hava Hegenbarth back as a guest blogger today. Hava volunteered as a puppy-raiser for Leader Dogs for years. We’ve never met face to face, but she’s been following our Safe & Sound blog since it started, so we feel we know each other. Hava is retired after a career in the diplomatic service, and longtime Safe & Sound blog readers will remember the poignant guest post she wrote in 2012 about her assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda. This new guest post by Hava demonstrates just how wide and varied her life experiences are – she’s an artist, too!

by Hava Hegenbarth

It was a rainy day in Botswana. Rain is a thing so rare in that desert country that the local name for their currency, “pula” means rain. Stuck indoors, I went net surfing, and somehow I ended up on The Seeing Eye’s web site.

I read the entire site, first page to last, and I was so impressed I sent them a donation. A thank you letter arrived later with an invitation to visit their school when I returned to the States, an invitation I took them up on. We’ve been friends ever since, and occasionally the Seeing Eye calls on me to provide artwork for them to use for notecards and jackets and such.

And then, last winter, a big project arrived. My veterinarian commissioned me to paint a mural for their office wall. I painted a scene of a stormy sky with cats and dogs falling onto a sea of colorful umbrellas. The title of my mural? ”Cloudy With a Chance of Golden Retrievers.”

When I sent a photo of the mural to my Seeing Eye friends, they asked if I’d do a mural for them on the walls of their new kennel.

Cloudy with a Chance of Golden Retrievers mural done of the office wall of a veterinarian. Shows all sorts of cats and dogs, twisting and falling out of a stormy sky onto a sea of colorful umbrellas. Just like the rain, that day in Botswana.

So who can say no to them? Not I. I was to go out for a month or so on the campus to paint my murals, but then the Seeing Eye had a second thought: they’d rather have hang-on-the-wall pictures instead of a mural.

One of the series of 12 pictures hung in the new kennel at The Seeing Eye. The picture shows a Seeing Eye employee handing a 7-week-old golden retriever puppy off to a volunteer puppy raiser. Just the hands and arms of the raiser and employee are shown, while the whole of the pup is visible. The pup has a sweet, innocent expression on its face, as if to say “I don’t know what this is all about, but I’m eager to please”. The caption reads A furry gift of love is given – to be returned.

I was disappointed at not being able to go out for a month, but once they pointed out that kennels can get dirty, walls are regularly washed and occasionally repainted, I could see their point. Washing and repainting are natural enemies of murals.

So I got to work on smaller paintings. I came up with a series of 12 paintings that tell the story of how the Seeing Eye transforms puppies into working guides and what it’s like to sent them out to do their work, and last month I traveled to Morristown, New Jersey for Family Day!

The Seeing Eye holds Family Day once a year to honor their puppy raisers. The raisers, all of them volunteers, got a chance to tour the new kennel and to see my paintings. Many were so moved by the story the pictures tell that they were brought to tears.

Some staff members told me the pictures affect them in the same way. “A book!” they said. “You need to put the picture story into a book!”

What do I know of writing books? Nothing. That’s when they told me to contact Beth and ask for her advice on how to get published. So I have done, and she has cheerfully obliged me with loads of ideas. So now to get to work as a writer. Who knows, next time you’re stuck indoors on a rainy day, a picture book about Seeing Eye puppies may provide you a good read.