Six days. Six long, hard days. Six long, hard, boring days...for a dog named Lady, anyway.
When wife, Danny, and I agreed to babysit our daughter’s 60-pound German Shorthaired Pointer puppy for the better part of last week, it never occurred to us that it might rain for the better part of last week. But, rain it did. Drenching rain. Soaking rain. Rain, rain, rain, and more rain.
A couple of weekends back we surveyed the fence around the backyard — which needed replacing a decade ago — and patched it up and propped it up and wired it up so Lady would be able to run back there. We blocked the holes with some old doors, some lattice, some plexiglass window panels and pretty much anything else we could find in the storage room and barn.
Turns out the falling down fence wasn’t that big of a deal anyway, because...did I mention it rained?
Lady is used to living in a small apartment with our daughter where she has been sufficiently spoiled and pretty much has the run of the place. The apartment complex also has a small fenced in dog park, and a dog bath house, and all the other amenities dogs seek out when they are seeking out an apartment of which to have free run.
Our house isn’t “big dog” friendly. We have a lot of stuff in our house. A lot of breakable glassware, and antiques, and just a whole lot of junk. Lady could care less whether that junk is valuable junk or just regular old junk, junk, which means when we were gone to work she had to live in a kennel in the kitchen.
We have two teacup Chihuahua’s of our own living in their kennel in the kitchen when we are gone so two kennels in the kitchen became a bit much, especially when the Chihuahuas don’t like the GSP and the GSP thinks the Chihuahuas would be the most fun thing in the world to play with.
But it was only going to be six days and Lady could play outside, in the patched up, fenced in backyard, and, well, it rained, and it rained, and it rained. Then the backyard became a muddy pit more suited for mud wrestling than dog walking and the floor from the kitchen door to the front door became a muddy path of great big doggy footprints. Day, after day, after day it became a great big path of great big, muddy doggy footprints.
Lady is also black. Very black and the backyard is dark, very dark, and she didn’t care if it was raining or not she wanted to play, even in the dark of the night. I already had nightmares of her finding a hole we missed patching on the fence in the daytime, much less at night when we couldn’t even see her eyes. But we survived that part and she didn’t escape a single time.
One morning about halfway through those six long, hard, boring- for-a-dog days, I let her out to do her business before sunrise and she decided she was invisible. I called her, I buzzed her little buzzing thing on her collar, I walked out in the rain and told her I could see her, and begged her to come inside, but she just looked at me and stood very, very still as if to say, “who me? You can’t see me!”
So I went inside and got a chew bone and tried to wade around the edges of the mud to the very back of the back of the yard where the invisible dog stood and coaxed her back to the house where she promptly jumped all over me, muddy feet and all, and I was already running late at that point.
That was the last time she went outside without a leash in the morning time before the sun came up.
By the fifth day Danny and I were sore. We had been beat up and drug around by a big ole, long-legged, dog that thinks she is a little bitty lapdog, but the good news was that the sun did finally come out.
But not before disaster could strike.
Danny took those fun loving (not) Chihuahuas out to walk in the front yard and I had Lady in the backyard and the temperatures were coming up and we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Then it happened.
In an effort to keep Lady from busting down the French door on the kitchen, which she plows straight into non-stop at a hundred miles an hour, I left it open.
As these two Chihuahuas do regularly, they commenced their crazy, frantic, barking at nothing at all. Lady’s head shot up, and she took off like a bolt of greased lightening through that back door, along that muddy footprint path to the front door, and to make a long story short, we now have to have new glass in the front door.
Thank goodness for clear Gorilla Tape and the fact that she didn’t go all the way though it anyway. And, of course,she didn’t get hurt!
Yes, it was six long, hard, days. Six very long, very hard days. How many days is that in dog years? I’m not sure, but I can tell you it is a bunch! A year, maybe two. Sure seems like it!
