Dogs are her life -- 24-7

Billie Wright spends 24-7 with dogs. Now, that’s a kind of lifestyle I can admire.

She’s a dog groomer who takes her own two pups with her every day from Minooka to the salon where she works in Homer Glen. So dogs are either in her car, on a table while she’s grooming them or in her bed at night. You might say she eats, sleep and breathes dogs.

Heaven.

In fact, Heaven is the name of her oldest dog, a wire fox terrier-beagle mix she originally adopted at a shelter for her niece Helen about five years ago.

But Billie didn’t start life as a genuine dog lover, like her niece, whose first word was “dog” and who got so excited she could barely breathe every time she saw one as a toddler.

Billie’s family in Glen Ellyn had dogs when she was a kid, but she was more interested in cats.     

“I was never a dog person, I was always a cat person … until I started grooming and then I discovered ‘Oh, that’s what makes them so interesting!’” she said.

She started dog grooming about 10 years ago because of her sister, Auburn Tyssen, who owns The Dog Wash in Minooka and was ...

“My sister got into it and was like ‘I need help.’ And I was like ‘Hey, you know what, this is cool!’” she said.

Billie’s second dog, Peep, is 1 ½ years old and isn’t sure if it’s canine or cat. She’s half Chihuahua, half Affenpinscher and only weighs about five pounds.

“She has this scrawny monkey face. She is the ugliest little dog in the world. Looks like a cat mixed with a bat. And everyone who comes in says she’s the cutest dog they’ve ever seen, but she has a weird face. She looks like an extraterrestrial,” Billie said.

Unfortunately, all of Peep’s images are on her cellphone and no one could figure out how to transfer them to a computer before deadline. This is a dog I would really like to see!

And then there’s her cat, Gytha, another rescue.

“She’s a mutt mix, looks like she is wearing a grey tuxedo. About a year ago she and some other kittens were dumped in a garbage bag behind a bar … She is Peep’s best friend, they curl up and go to sleep together,” Billie said.

The names of all three of her pets are taken from Terry Pratchett novels.

Billie moved to Minooka about five years ago when she was badly bitten while grooming a Sheltie mix.

“The owner knew it hated having its nails done and lied to me. I was doing the very last nail, I put its paw down and it whipped around and got my hand and nailed me. I immediately went to a quick care across the street. But when I woke up the next day, it hurt more. And I kept thinking it would be OK. It ended up my whole arm was infected, I was in the hospital for a week; IV antibiotics for a month,” she said.

“You always hear people say dog bites don’t get infected, that a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s mouth. That’s still not so clean.”   

The only silver lining in this story is that Billie was working at a pet chain store at the time and worker’s compensation paid for everything.

“A lot of us (groomers) don’t have insurance or have only minimal insurance,” she said. “You are always taking a chance… a dog may seem perfect, and then it goes from zero to Cujo in a second.”

Once bitten, twice shy, the saying goes. But Billie still loves dogs. 

“An aggressive dog, you can read,” she said. “But a scared dog cowering in the corner is all tensed up… you don’t know if it’s going to lunge at you or lay down and pee.”

Like her sister Auburn, Billie doesn’t believe in grooming dogs rapidly in assembly-line fashion. She wants to get to know a new customer so they can form a trust relationship.

All the family Billie has now lives in Minooka: Her two surviving sisters. Growing up, there were four girls in one bedroom and that wasn’t pretty – especially during puberty.

“We were all ‘When I’m 18 I will never talk to you again. And now we live in each other’s back pocket,” she said.

That’s not to say they don’t occasionally fight like … um…  cats and dogs.

    Jan Larsen is an outreach coordinator at Joliet Job Corps who loves dogs and adores her companion Frosty the Wonder Dog. She can be reached at janettellarsen@aol.com