In love again!

I'm falling desperately in love with a dog!

It's a female, and she belongs to a friend.  She has declared that the dog belongs to me, too, but ... Anyway, I just have to blog about this sweetheart.

She is very old, and various estimates put her age at between fourteen and sixteen years.  But she has the loveliest eyes, and beautiful coloring, and a lot of gracefulness in her moves.  Of course, she's rickety, and her sight is weak, and her hearing is gone, and she's mostly interested in begging for food all the daylight hours, but, oh!  I just want to hug her all the time!

So whenever I visit, this dog is hanging out in the kitchen, getting underfoot.  (When I visit, most of the time we're fixing something to eat, so the dog follows her nose straight to the action.  Now, by a process of association, she just comes over on spec.)  My friend goes nuts, and yells at the dog, and when that doesn't work (the dog pretends not to hear, but it's clear to anyone that she's getting yelled at, and she's not that blind) my friend puts some furniture across the entrance to the kitchen area, to fence the dog out.

She just loves to go on a walk.  When my friend puts on her sneakers, the dog comes and stands close, watching her intently.  When her leash is finally pulled out, she prances around, impatient to get going!  There is another dog, about a quarter of her age, a mere pup, but he's enormous, close to eighty pounds of pure muscle.  He's rather a lunk, really, even if he is lovable and good natured.  When an excursion is about to happen, the bigger dog gets so rambunctious that he often knocks the older one down, and gets a surly snarl from her.  That was about a year ago; now she just staggers back, and keeps out of his way with a frown.

Once we set out, the older dog has the greatest grin on her face, and continues to grin until she's exhausted, or until she's back home.  Meanwhile the big male dog is straining at the leash, his nose to the ground, trying to extract every bit of olfactory information from the route we're traversing.  I don't know whether he's bright enough to make sense of all that information, but he's certainly sniffing it all up.  And, of course, he has to pee on every significant post and shrub we come across.

The household also has two cats, who are very interesting.  One is a middle-aged male stripey cat, with most amazingly beautiful eyes you ever saw.  The other is a dainty little white princess, about half his age.  A college friend was of the opinion that cats were barely about a tenth as intelligent as dogs, and I have to agree; cats are not aware of the moods of people at all.  When they hop up and want to be affectionate, it is nothing to do with you; it is something that she decides to do all by herself.  If you're upset with her, and not ready to play, they're surprised, and scurry off to get out of your way.  In contrast, dogs have made a study of you, and know your mental state intimately.

I suppose there are extraordinary cats who know when you're down, and try to cheer you up.  But I think that's more the exception than the rule.

A couple of times, as we were setting out, one of the cats wanted to come along, too!  My friend was not confident about their ability to come home again, so we have to go back in the house, and shut the cats up, to prevent them from following!  It was funny to watch them marching along behind us as we first set out!  It seems almost certain that they can sniff their way back, but we didn't want to take the risk.

So I'm visiting fairly often, just to see the "critters," as she calls them.  This could go somewhere.

Kay