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photography

Nancy & Strummer's 1st Year

Doug Mahugh

• 3 min read
Nancy & Strummer's 1st Year

It's hard to believe that it was just a year ago today that we drove Nancy and her brother Strummer from Seattle to Montana the day after we picked them up at the breeder in Canada. What a ride. This post has a photo of the two of them together every month of the last year except for March 2020, the only month in which they never saw each other. I'm hopeful that we can succeed in never letting them go a month without seeing one another ever again.

January 2020

Strummer (left) and Nancy lived their first 9 weeks without stairs. We drove them from Summerhill Samoyeds in British Columbia to our house in Seattle, and these were the first stairs they had ever seen. They were not intimidated, as you can see. More than any other photo I took on that first day, I feel this sums up the personalities they have come to embody in the year since.

February 2020

A month after delivering Strummer to his home in Montana, we drove to Butte and toured eight houses, then drove to Strummer's place that night. This late-night shot is around the time that we humans decided to make an offer on a big white house on the Lower West Side of Butte, where Nancy lives today.

April 2020

We moved to Montana in early April, in the midst of the biggest pandemic in a century. The complexity of that move and that month still seem a bit surreal, but the first time we took Nancy to visit Strummer they both knew exactly what to do.

May 2020

Sunsets in Montana are renowned, surreal, and even better than you think they are if you've never seen one. Nancy and Strummer played from the daylight into the darkness many times in 2020.

June 2020

After two months of living in Butte, Nancy finally had an opportunity to have her brother over for a visit at our house.

July 2020

We spent the night of the 4th of July camped out on Strummer's porch.

August 2020

In August we had Rosie the Chihuahua-Dachsund from Berkeley visiting, so we took her to Strummer's place, where Nacy and Strummer showed off their wrestling moves.

September 2020

The locust and drought had eliminated most of Strummer's lawn over the summer, but Nancy and Strummer didn't care.

October 2020

A final romp before the snow: a week after this photo, we had 10 inches of snow on the ground and the temperature was dropping well below zero.

November 2020

The weather was warmer in November than October, and Nancy and Strummer took advantage of the opportunity to get together.

December 2020

In early December, Strummer got neutered and Nancy got spayed. This was their first reunion after four weeks apart, and they made up for lost time.

January 2021

One year after the day Strummer moved to Montana, Nancy (left) and Strummer got together to race around Strummer's big back yard in the country.