Story and photos by Anne Cosgrove Wimberly
Dawn Butler is a widow, a retired real estate agent, and a senior citizen (a true lady never reveals her exact age) who remembers the scientific names of nearly every plant she has seen. Butler and I and a few other ladies from our Master Gardener class recently took a trip to the Bustani Plant Farm. As Butler drove us from her Oklahoma City home toward Stillwater, I was excited when she said how much she enjoyed sharing her home and heart with the love of her life.
Then she told how she met the love of her life in a Walmart parking lot, took him into her arms, and named him Petey.
“He’s a teacup Yorkie, which is not an actual breed recognized by the American Kennel Club, but he’s recognized by me as Mr. Sweetie Petey Bocephus Butler,” Butler later told me.
Butler also shared how much she doesn’t like animals, how her friends think she’s crazy, how she has recently gotten used to Petey’s licks, and how she successfully avoids wet dog food. The one thing she can’t avoid is, well, picking up after Petey.
Deciding To Adopt
Why would a plant-loving senior lady who doesn’t like animals bring home a dog who has been bred to dig in the dirt?
“I was lonely,” Butler said. “I had been retired for a couple of years.” Her niece had praised the woman from whom she had obtained a two-pound-plus female Yorkie.
“And so I contacted the lady, and she said she had this one male, and I said I was looking for a female. But I guess a male will be OK,” said Butler.
And the contradictions don’t end there.
“I didn’t want a yippy dog, and Yorkies are known for being yippy dogs,” Butler said. “But I researched little dogs. And I kind of knew I wanted a Yorkie, but I also looked at Maltese. I knew I wanted a very small dog. I have a lot of arthritis in my hands and, well, everywhere. I knew that if I needed to pick up a dog, I wanted it to be light enough that it wasn’t going to hurt both of us.”
Teacup Yorkies typically weigh two to five pounds. Petey, after a relaxing visit
to his groomer, weighs three pounds
15 ounces.
Even though he is little and is a boy, Butler loves his massive personality.
“I still think about how much I had wanted a female, but he’s just perfect, he’s perfect,” Butler said. “He can dance on his back legs. He loves to go into the backyard. He goes to bed at night without any complaint. Oh, and he sleeps until I get up in the morning and let him out, and then he comes in and sits next to me on the couch and sleeps for about three or four hours. He’s just the calmest thing until 2 o’clock, and then he becomes a completely different personality, and he’s crazy and weird and wacko and very active. We have lots of fun in the afternoon.”
How did this rambunctious little dog earn such a big name?
“My first grandchild was a granddaughter, and I called her Sweetie Petey. But when I had grandsons, I called them Sweetie Pea. I had four names picked out for the dog. But when the lady handed him to me in the Walmart parking lot in Texas, he was shaking so badly, and I said, “Oh, it’s OK, Sweetie Petey.’ ”
Petey’s middle name, Bocephus, refers to Cephas, another name for Peter in the Bible.
“The ‘Bo’ is just for fun,” Butler quipped.
Playing Hide-and-Seek
Luckily for Butler, Petey is not a yippy dog. He is so quiet sometimes that she can’t find him. One afternoon, Butler and Petey were gardening. Butler couldn’t locate Petey in her yard. She searched in the vegetables, under the flowers, and all along the fences. She checked and double-checked a little hole in one of the fences that led to a neighbor’s backyard. On closer inspection, she noticed Petey’s head in the hole.
“He just looked at me, and he didn’t make a noise,” Butler said. “I’ve searched the entire house for him on other occasions. Oh, my, I’ve gotten on the floor to look under the furniture and found him on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf watching me.” Another time, Petey quietly sat in a room behind a closed door while Butler called his name and searched under pillows and inside cabinets.
Speaking the Same Language
It seems as though the relationship between Dawn Butler and Mr. Sweetie Petey Bocephus Butler should be rife with contradiction, but just the opposite is true.
“He speaks my language,” Butler said. And that language is — yup, you guessed it — love. “I’m telling you, I have never felt this kind of love, ever. And it’s really easy to give right back.”
The next time I meet Butler for a drive to a nursery, I hope she brings the love of her life with her. She did, after all, teach him how to ride nicely in a car. She also researched dog-friendly stops in Oklahoma and Texas.
Why would a plant-loving senior lady who doesn’t like pets bring home a teacup Yorkie?
So she can fill her heart and home with love and still have room in her car for plants and gardening supplies, of course! And, it is hoped, a human friend or two….
