There was one practice in Ithaca which was known to hire women, and I applied there straightaway. Nothing came of it for six months, during which time I moped around the house, doing all the housework I had neglected over the past six years, refusing to consider that my work would come to nothing. Then, just before Christmas, I had a telephone call from the practice. They wanted to know whether I was still available to work; one of their vets was retiring in the new year. Large animal and small. It would mean farm call-outs, the owner said, and he wanted to know whether, as a woman, I would be up to it.

‘I grew up on a farm,’ I replied. ‘I love large animal work.’

Believe it or not, the vet retiring was the one who had been so terrible when Sunny died, and I thought how funny life was that now, seven years later, I would be the one to replace him. Those first years were the steepest learning curve of all. I performed a tracheotomy on a horse. A caesarean on a sheep. I amputated limbs from dogs who had been injured by cars, spayed thousands of pets and resuscitated a pet parrot.

But the humans tested me more than the animals. There was the farmer who, when he saw me step out of my car, said, ‘I told them not to send the broad.’ The dog owner who thought I was the nurse and asked when the vet would arrive. The owners who refused to pay for treatment and let their pets suffer needlessly because ‘it was just an animal’. The pets rescued from homes where they were neglected or abused, the fear which never quite disappeared from their eyes.

Two years later, when we moved back to Virginia to look after Jim’s mother, I opened my own practice. I learned that purpose might come late in life, but lateness does not mute its strength. At forty-four I knew how to save a cow with a prolapsed uterus, how to tell by feeling a dog’s stomach if he had an obstructed bowel, how to extract a terrified cat from the corner of her cage without being scratched. The children spent their summers home from college working in the clinic, cleaning cages and hosing runs, walking dogs, feeding those who weren’t too sick to eat. Caroline and Andy seemed to inherit my love of animals. I would find Caroline sitting beside the cages of the loneliest animals, singing top-forty tunes. Andy loved nothing more than coming on the farm calls, standing knee deep in cow muck helping me to pull a calf from a birthing cow.

Strange how life is a circle, how that which filled my girlhood gave me purpose later in life. Strange to be drawn back to that steady silent language of animals; the ways their eyes and your hands could speak when human language failed.