I’m just about ready to drop some money on a mystery: What kind of dog is my dog? Or is she even a dog? Because she’s quite peculiar. Not in a bad way. There’s peculiar bad — like what you say when you’re trying to be polite: “I must say, GULP!, this apple and sausage pie is, you know, peculiar!” And then there’s just plain peculiar … the true definition … like “what the hell is that thing?” That’s my dog, Lily.
A new dog in the house … with a taste for Christmas lights
If you’ve ever tried to buy Christmas tree lights the week of Christmas, you know it’s a fool’s errand. The store shelves are bare of white lights. The clerks think you have beanbags for a brain when you ask where they are. “A little late in the game, aren’t you?” they say before pointing out a strand of cough-syrupy red lights long enough to wrap the Empire State Building. Or a box of twinkling snowflakes that look more like sickly amoeba.
Coming to terms with a silent, dog-less house
It’s a quiet house. An empty house. You don’t hear the rat-a-tat-tat of toenails on the hardwood floors. Or feel hot breath on your kneecaps at dinner. There’s no need for spastic, acrobatic leaps when you turn around at the fridge, realizing an instant too late there’s a dog sitting at your feet. She would scramble out of the way when she saw I was about to topple on her.
What foulness seeps from the kitchen? Ah … homemade dog food!
“It’s the most beautiful day outside,” my wife said this past weekend. The windows to the house were open and she was on the porch eating ice cream and doing things Floridians love to do in January when the rest of the country is shoveling snow. No wonder people hate us. “You can even start to smell spring,” she continued, “which is why I feel especially bad that we’re stinking up the street with the stench of that dog food.” Homemade dog food, thank you. “Can you really smell it outside?” I asked, standing over my special concoction, a clothespin pinching off my nostrils. “Well, I could right before I passed out. Some of the trees have started wilting.”