Even though it is still late fall, the advancing winter has not hesitated to send early signals, made more prickly in its intrusion with chilling breezes that belie the sunshine of any given day. The photo above, from back on Tuesday, December 5, catches driveway chill time for me and the dogs as viewed from the security camera. It all seems calm and content enough, no?
Ah, but in this picture of the new pup Scarlett, it’s rather telling that you can’t really discern whether she is up to something good or bad, as she lay in the back hallway recently. My final day of work for the fall semester occurred that next day. This was a long day for the pooches to be crated and, when the marvelous dear Amy swung by the house to check on them and serve up lunch bowls, she found a trail of destructive chicanery perpetrated by that she-imp.
She had batted and scratched enough at the front wall of her crate that she got it to disengage from its hooks, allowing the door panel to fall inward and bestow upon her the sweet paradise of freedom. That little jailbreaker proceeded to rip out the stuffing from Sumner’s dog bed, with balls of it all scattered around the bedroom.
She also managed to completely chew through both her own collar and Sumner’s, which we remove when they are crated and which I’d left on the floor in front of the crates to make it easy for Amy when she came to let them out.
I mean: completely severing them to a permanent state of uselessness! We can count some blessings about what didn’t happen or what she didn’t do, though: she didn’t pee or poop, she didn’t scratch the finish off the bedroom door, she didn’t tear apart the bedspread or dig into the closet and chew all my dress and tennis shoes, she didn’t chew any electrical cords. There was evidence nonetheless that she’d jumped on the bed and maybe even nestled in for a brief rest from all her wild abandon.
But it took its toll on the entrapped Sumner, who probably remained at an elevated state of internal panic and fear as he watched her be such a bad bad girl, knowing it would not end well for our normally happy family. He has such a potent internal moral compass and shame reflex, it mortifies him to be in trouble or to earn rebuke. He takes on the emotional burden even if it’s Scarlett and not he receiving the sharp commands or corrective gestures. By the time I’d gotten out of my suit, and bent down to pet him a bit, he curled up into a ball in my awkwardly-splayed lap and just stayed there for a while. The rest of the evening, my lap was the only place he wanted to be; the photo above from that night shows that everybody just needed time to recover from the events of the day.
Trouper that he is, you can see Sumner did his best to grin and bear it.
Last Thursday offered up a lovely stark dawning as viewed from the third floor center dormer window.
It warmed up enough as the day proceeded that a jacket wasn’t required when the dogs and I did a 2.6-mile circuit around downtown. Since Scarlett ripped up Sumner’s crate pad, I had temporarily replaced it with his window seat pallet from upstairs. So of course Scarlett heads there instead of her own crate at bedtime!
I don’t know, my friends: I think Sumner has been traumatized lately. His endless need for lap time anytime I sit either upstairs or down leads me to believe that his bearing it is as big a struggle as his grinning. We both find ourselves sometimes misty-eyed in longing for bygone days.
