The Hair of the Dog
I’m not sure what people were thinking when it came to our back yard. The tiny area is a mish-mash of pavers and concrete slabs; think trip hazards tilting in multiple directions, all for the want of half an hour with a good bobcat operator. Leveling things now, after the fact, would take days, although every time I turn my ankle while hanging up the washing, I think about asking the Benevolent Society if we can pay for it ourselves.
But whilst I grumble about pooling water and the difficulty of getting things up the ramp into the shed, the Little White Dog glories in the architecture. She trots out to the veggie patch each morning to fertilise the chives, and then returns to the kitchen at full speed. Not for her the caution of old age! She bounds down onto the path, leaps across the gappy pavers onto the ramp, where she pushes off for a long jump across the broken piece of concrete down onto smoother ground. Then she races to the dog door. Apparently, you should always go in via the dog door, for like the Narnia wardrobe, it leads to good things: nuggets!
Sometimes she gets it wrong. The other night she misjudged the distance to the ramp where she does the parkour deflection; this can happen when you are a sixteen year old dog who is only five years old at heart. She hit the concrete like a rally car bottoming out in a flood-way, launched forward regardless, skidded along on her chin, but kept going to arrive at the door as though it was all planned that way.
It must have hurt. For one thing, she didn’t do one of her frequent high speed circuits of the unit when she came inside, hurtling up on to the bed, and off again. She did that this morning, and misjudged the leap onto her footstool, resulting in a crash which made both of us flinch. If I fell over running full tilt, the gravel rash would be horrible, and maybe bones would be broken. But like the concrete crash, after this morning’s slip up no damage was apparent! Perhaps this is why dogs have fur. It soaks up the crashes and stops gravel rash.
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