By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer

GREENE – For more than two weeks, Citron the golden retriever was missing.

For weeks, Citron’s family searched in vain for the goofy dog who liked to eat pistachio nuts and spit out the shells.

The five children, ages 5 to 18, plastered stores with fliers, begging someone to bring their dog home. Their parents, Chantal Baril and Ray St. Laurant, called animal shelter after animal shelter in hopes that Citron had simply wandered away.

They weren’t about to give up on a member of the family.

“Our son is gone,” Baril said two weeks ago.

On May 5, their pleas were answered. A worker at Maine Poly in Greene called the local animal shelter looking for the owner of a dog he’d found.

Within hours, Citron was home.

“I just want to thank him for returning him,” Baril said. “He didn’t have to do that.”

Citron was a golden bundle of puppy fur when Baril got him three years ago. St. Laurant, who was then dating Baril, bought Citron’s brother.

A year and a half later, Citron’s brother was hit by a car and killed. The newly blended family grieved and lavished attention on the only dog it had left. Citron went everywhere with the girls and their parents, even to work with St. Laurant.

Citron had just been shaved – the appointment still fresh on the family calendar – the day St. Laurant dropped him off at home during his lunch break. When the girls came home a few hours later, Citron wasn’t in the yard.

Calls to animal shelters turned up nothing. The five girls papered their town in “Lost Dog” posters and asked their school to make an announcement over the PA system.

For the family, nighttime was the hardest.

“It’s almost like you wait to hear him. At the slightest sound you flip on the light and look for him,” Baril said.

Then, they got The Call. A worker at Maine Poly, which sits a couple of miles from the family’s home, found Citron. He had two dogs of his own and knew someone had to be missing this one.

Baril left work to go get him. She called her girls on their cell phones.

“Of course they screamed,” she said. “I have been shaking all day.”

The family has dubbed Citron’s two-week absence his “vacation.”

“He went right back to work with his dad,” Baril said.