I'm More Like My Dogs Than I Realized ...

When I talk about my dogs, two words seem to come up the most: sweet and annoying.  My dogs are annoying (my golden retriever in particular), but I love them dearly and wouldn't change anything about them.

Which is probably a good thing since I had an epiphany a few minutes ago that made me realize that my dogs and I have a great deal in common (and, yeah, "sweet" and "annoying" probably do fit in there).

We're staying at the beach house right now, which probably requires some explanation.

My grandfather was a passionate golfer, and the story goes that he bought the beach house for my grandmother, whose passion was the beach, so that he could play golf without feeling guilty.  Or something like that.

The generosity of my grandfather allowed us to grow up on the beach, spending summer days in the ocean and afternoons and evenings playing cards on the screened-in porch.  Good times ...

Since my grandfather passed away, my mother and uncles have divided the summer up into thirds and each one "gets" the beach house during their time.  Anyway, my mother got the last third this year, so here we are.

When the girls and I went to live at my mother's house following the start of the divorce saga, we brought our black lab, Sonja, to live with my mother and the previously mentioned Mollie.   The dogs are really tight, believe it or not, and spread sweetness wherever they go.

And annoyance.

They do not do well at the beach house.  They bark.  They whine.  They jump at shadows, including every time a wave crashes.  They are, quite simply, not very happy.  And because we have an electric fence at home, they're used to running free, so having a much smaller living space--and a tiny dog pen with which to do their business--is tough for them.

Historically, I've spent the night at the other house (it's less than ten minutes away) with the dogs while my mother stays at the beach house with Addie and Belle.

Just before we moved down here, Sonja's electric fence collar broke (fortunately she went into the neighbor's backyard instead of the road), so I had to walk her on a leash so she could do her thing.  My mother sent her collar off to get fixed, but this just happened to coincide with me being gone for three days to an education conference.

My mother, a much braver woman than I, decided to have the dogs stay at the beach house while I was gone, and I guess they weren't terrible.

She's gone up north for the weekend for the 50th wedding anniversary of her friends, so after I got Sonja's repaired collar back in the mail yesterday, I was planning on bringing the dogs back to the house posthaste.

Except that the girls (my daughters, not my dogs) really wanted to stay down here, and I'm not comfortable leaving them alone.

So I caved, and I think I've apologized to over fifty people since the dogs woke up ready to face the day at six this morning.

Simply put, they don't like change.  They're used to having acres to run around in when a door is opened.  Our house is on a busy road in terms of cars, but very quiet in terms of people.    They're not used to hordes of people walking by right in front of them at all times.

When I went to make coffee this morning, I found the coffee maker beyond my skill.  It's different than the one at home, and I ended up making the worst coffee ever.

Then I went to put Splenda in my pathetic coffee, and we didn't have any, so I had to use sugar.

Last night, I had the urge to watch NCIS, but Addie had already claimed the television to watch some show called Say Yes to the Dress.  At home, we have multiple televisions; here, there's only one.

I don't want it to sound like I'm complaining, because I adore being down here more than I can express with words.

No, the point I'm trying to make is that it hit me like a ton of bricks that the very thing annoying me about my dogs (their reluctance to change) is also true of me.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I can't seem to make it any clearer through writing ... you see, I haven't had any coffee this morning ;-)

I'm Sorry, Kermit!

When I was seventeen, I hit a chipmunk on my way to work. It was the first time I'd ever killed anything in my life (I'm one of those people that catches a spider or bumblebee then releases them outside--the only exception is mosquitos), and I was distraught. I was such a mess, in fact, that I actually got sent home from work because I couldn't stop crying.

I've had other roadkill incidents since then, and while I always feel badly about it, I no longer go into hysterics. I mean, sometimes those squirrels just run right out in front of you. I always try to dodge them if possible, but sometimes there's just nothing you can do.

Something happened one night last week that reminded me of my utter devastation over the first chipmunk I hit, and it got me pondering the proverbial food chain and the equity (or inequity, I guess you'd say) of the animals, big and small, that are killed incidentally by human beings.

I live very close to the ocean, and there is a lot of marshland surrounding the roads near my house. Sometimes at night, you can hear the frogs singing, a beautiful choir that's obviously not planned but somehow sounds intentional anyway.

One night last week, I was coming home from dinner in Massachusetts with a friend. It was pretty late--bordering on midnight--and it had been raining all day and most of the night. All of a sudden, with no warning at all, the boggy road I was on was covered with frogs. Covered.

I felt a twinge of the girl I was at seventeen rise up inside as I realized that I was driving over frogs. Like, multitudes of frogs. We're talking froggie family reunion here.

I considered reversing up the road, changing direction, getting back on the highway, and going home in a way that would have allowed me to circumvent the avenue of amphibians. If I'd been seventeen, I would without question have done it. There were two things that stopped me:

1) I could see in my rear view mirror that the frogs that had escaped certain death under the deadly wheels of my car were hopping over their dead and injured brethren, bound for the relative safety of the moonlit marshes on either side of the road. They had avoided the wheel of fortune's death knell once, and it seemed cruel on a whole bunch of levels to reverse over them--I don't know much, but I do know that fate only goes your way so many times, and they'd already been scared and shaken.

2) It was very late, I was exhausted, and I wanted to be home as quickly as possible.

And so I plowed ahead, flattening countless frogs in the process because they were so prolific that attempting to dodge them was futile. For nearly a mile, though, I weaved my little sedan slowly around the larger gathering spots, avoiding sitting water because they really seemed to conglomerate in and around puddles on the road.

And I cried, not with the sharp and sudden agony of knowing that I'd killed a little chipmunk dashing across the street but with a longer, stronger awareness that the road was basically paved with frogs, that I did not want to hurt them and wished that they would hop off to froggie endeavors that would have kept them off the road, and that, ultimately, there was absolutely nothing I could do to change my undesired mass murder of dozens, maybe hundreds of frogs.

It occurred to me as I drove, trying to ignore the fact that the normally smooth road was characterized by scores of small but frequent bumps, that there were many metaphors to be drawn here ... and that none of them were happy.