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Gina Thackara said her 5-year-old Wheaten Terrier, Maggie, most enjoys drinking water from the water feature found in her backyard. But on a recent visit, 13-year-old Vinny, another Wheaten Terrier, was the one quenching his thirst.

CLARK VAN ORDEN /THE TIMES LEADER

You should see the rock Gina Thackara got a few years ago as a birthday gift from her husband, Tom.
It’s no diamond. For the avid Kingston gardener, it’s far better.
It’s a “basketball on steroids,” about which the Wilkes University Spanish professor frequently makes the gift-rock joke. It’s basically a round, gray water ball, on display in her backyard, which her 5-year-old Wheaten Terrier, Maggie, appreciates almost as much as she does. The pooch uses it as her personal drinking fountain.
For Thackara, the water feature was a much more practical gift because she “wouldn’t wear the ring that much anyway.”
“I work in the garden, so I get this wonderful peace of sound,” said Thackara, who tends to a plethora of backyard plants each week: sunflowers, forsythias and black-eyed Susans, to name a few of the things growing in the soil around her North Loveland Avenue home.
“I’ve gotten such pleasure from it,” Thackara said of her water feature, which sits among other rocks and flowers.
Water continually comes out through an opening at the top of the ball and cascades down the sides, relaxing Thackara as she refinishes furniture on her back porch or takes a break on the swing.
“They’re not hard to take care of,” Thackara said, noting that once in a while she’ll throw in some Clorox cleaner and will take the pump out each winter so it doesn’t freeze.
The backstory is that when her birthday came around a few years back, her husband wanted to pick her up a nice piece of jewelry, but she politely declined. Instead, on a trip through Tunkhannock, she proposed stopping at Creekside Gardens, a popular shop among local green thumbs, to find a millstone.
You know, one of those round, rocklike objects that looks like a “caveman’s wheel,” as Thackara describes it. It usually rests flat.
Tom, however, thought they should pick up something with a little more elevation to sit prominently by their back porch, which is how they ended up with the water ball.
Sherri Kukuchka of Creekside Gardens says this particular water feature, with materials, costs about $600, but seekers of similar novelties have a host of options.
She tells people to use their imagination when shopping around: “Most anything can be transformed into a bubbling water feature.”
Customers can buy pots overflowing with water or statuary-type fountains.
“The possibilities are endless,” she said.
For Thackara, the pleasure her feature brings is well worth the dollars spent.
Her pooches, especially Maggie, the more likely of the two Wheaten Terriers to sip the water, would agree.
This isn’t the first time Thackara has requested an item for her home over other birthday gifts typically bestowed upon mothers, such as jewelry, clothing or perfume.
When her son asked her one year if she wanted pajamas, she said. “No, I want a gargoyle.”