Christmas is a great time to have a dog or to receive a dog as a gift. Our Peachie is gone and we have a newer, younger and more enegergetic lab named “Emily.” But it is Peachie who shared so many happy Christmases with us. There were accidents along the way of course. These may sound familiar to those of you who choose to read about dogs.
When we brought Peachie home for the first time, she was to be comfortable in her outdoor kennel in the daytime, and after a delightful evening of play and petting, she was scheduled to retire to her modest but comfortable dog house I had so carefully constructed out in her kennel. According to the neighbors, she howled all day while we were at work. The first night spent in her kennel she was bitten by a spider. Oh well, so much for our idealized version of how it would all go. I had no choice but to leave her in the kennel in the daytime, but never again would she-a gorgeous and seemingly vulnerable puppy- ever spend another night in the wild. Did I mention we live in the woods and our neighbors were soon telling us tails of bears, coyotees and foxes?
This meant that I would have to walk her in the night as nature called. And so, my training and financial outlay began. Evenings went okay and she settled into her bedtime routine, though she occassionally whined and wimpered and pedaled with her legs while presumably retrieving birds in her childish dreams. Once, awakened in the night by her need to go outside, she pulled me down thirteen garden steps. And, worse, I was coming to realize that the neighbors were not exagerating about wild beasts roaming the woods. We could see them at twilight and dawn cossing the road. Occasionally, we would see a snake in the yard -a huge black king snake, maybe 17 feet long (more or less).
I finally realized a fence would be necessary. A few phone calls, calculations and estimates by local fence building companies later, I concluded I would have to build a fence myself. Plans for enclosing only the part of our land Peachie would use were soon vetoed down by my wife, who is a self- educated engineer. The project grew from an estimated $400 dollars to $4000 (provided I did all the work). And, I did. I hauled every stick and screw home from Home Depot in the back and on top of our trusty Honda. Construction proceeded in stages as weekends and summer evenings were filled with the inspiring sound of my electric screwdriver whining away and the echo of oaths muttered by yours truly when I frequently picked up a cedar board and had splinters inserted under my skin -or, when I dropped one of those expensive self-driving screws in the dead leaves where I would later recover it using my lawnmower.
Visiting grandkids wanted to help of course, speeding the process not at all, but building memories and exposing the little girls to language they would later find useful in college, as when they discovered they were having a Monday math exam or a date showed up in a deathtrap fixer-upper. Still, this was building good memories. In a mere six months, I was able to install 22 posts set in concrete, screwed on over three hundred fence boards and spent the equivalent of one year’s college tuition or a small yacht. Our lot is damatically rolling and many days I simply sat and stared, drink in hand, wondering how I should or could possibly continue.
The result looks like the great wall of China built to half-scale. But it works. Best thing I ever did for our home. Now my gardening efforts are tauntly contained and the neighbors leaves can’t blow onto my yard. Nor do I have to see the “restoration projects” involving rusting old cars going on, or see my neighbors sunbathing in the nude around non-existant swimming pools (they sometimes use a water sprinkler). Best of all, their small children and dogs can’t get into our yard. This annoyed Peachie at times-she could hear them and smell them, even talk too them as well, but could never physically interact. This helps explain why she grew up as a human being instead of a dog. Oh, she tolerated other dogs when she encoutered them on our walks or trips to Home Depot. But don’t count on leaving your dog home while you are on vacation-Peachie learned to howl after a one-night stay in a boarding facility and returned home with the only cold she ever seems to have developed.
Peachie had the run of the house and we installed a doggie door so we would not have to get up with her in the night. The door had to be so big that many times, as we retired to bed, we have discussed whether a bear or opossum might come in that way. Once when we locked ourslves out of the house, Peachie’s mother (my wife who has requested to remain unnamed in my writing) had to climb through the doggie door to get in. This is a bit of a sore paoint with us, since I was the one who locked us out. Nevertheless, next to canned beer and the battery powered drill, I would rank doggie doors as the third greatest creation of man.
Getting back to the Christmas theme, during those early puppy months, Peachie was still penned up at night and left in the fenced yard during the day. So, when we put up the Christmas Tree, we a had no problems with Peachie. But that next year, when she had her in/out doggie door, she took more interest in the tree and we noticed one evening after dinner, as we settled in to watch “Jeapordy”, that Peachie had eaten all the glass ornaments off the lower limbs of the tree. We searched to see if she had hidden them, studied the carpet for shards of glass. Next day, we rushed her to our kindly vet who -for a small fee equivalent to dinner out- told us in a very calm and sympathetic voice that all we could do is wait and see. I will not weigh you down with details about how we were to gauge her progress in ridding herself of glass bits, Suffice it to say, Peachie never showed the slightest signs of digestive problems. And, because we held several parental conferences with her, she never again ate a glass ornament (so far as we know).
We always afterward purchased a nice toy for Peachie to find under the Christmas tree (with a bit of encouragement provided by wraping a treat with the present). In accepting our pets as family members, we offer up the very best of our feelings, emotional expressions usually reserved for children and loved ones. Its Christmas season, so think of the “Adoration of the Magi.” They traveled a great distance with expensive gifts to honor a child whose significance they knew was great, but they could hardly have known exactly why. We adore our dogs in somewhat the same way, exhibiting our best to these mysteriously intelligent creatures, believing they will at least tolerate our failings and faults.
Christmas without a dog? Not as along as I can afford to keep one up. I heard a rumor that there is a provision in the newly passed bill to “Build Back” America that provides for a tax credit if we adopt a dog from a rescue facility. Could this be true? Then what about a tax credit for yard fencing if you adopt a dog? Or, subsidizing the economy by allowing a tax deduction for doggie doors if manufactured in the USA. Sounds right to me. Make it retroactive.