Haley and I are home with the dogs, both of us bored to differing degrees about different things – me, bored with my general existence; Haley, bored with television in general. Hannah and Mommy are at piano lessons. Ginger is in heat, lounging about the house on the couch like a depressed, middle-aged, sexually frustrated housewife on her period, generally miserable and miserable to be around.
Daisy, our three month old Vizsla pup and Ginger’s new little sister, is the most energetic of us all, running about the house with boundless chaotic infantile energy, casting random growls about, and haphazardly lashing us with her ferocious tongue. And this is Daisy when she’s bored, like she is now because Ginger’s in heat and has no desire to play. Imagine her not bored!
Daisy barks at Haley, who redirects her attention back to a chewie on the floor. Undeterred, Daisy jumps up on the couch, a feat she only perfected last week after two straight weeks of crashing chest-first into the cushions. Daisy pounces on Ginger, who is trying to be comfortable in her bitchy misery, and mouths Ginger’s left ear. This forces a grumble out of Ginger as she rolls over, pinning Daisy against the back of the couch.
The subtle realization of how completely and irrevocably our lives had changed set in about a month after Daisy’s arrival. Ginger’s life has been the most impacted. I almost believe the puppy has actually become a calming influence on Ginger (and those of you who actually know Ginger are right now thinking “Yeah, right”).
The Daisy Effect on Ginger has most noticeably made her less manic, especially whenever visitors come over. There’s less of the wrist-mouthing, leaping kisses, and incessant cold-nosing that Ginger normally performs as she comprehensively greets each and every individual guest by trying to lick every square inch of their exposed flesh. Now she just tries to lick most of the exposed flesh. It’s a subtle change. Before Daisy, Ginger was a kamikaze attack greeter, blitzing guests with slobber and love as she mouthed their wrists and leaped into their faces.
After Daisy, Ginger now acts like a frazzled but polished Martha Stewart who has just opened the front door to her weekend home to find one hundred uninvited and important guests waiting to come in and eat. And even though Martha knows she has nothing to feed these guests and nowhere for them to sleep, thus damning them all to a weekend of misery, she hides all of this horrific news behind an impenetrable veil of elegance and grace as she greets every one of these guests warmly and personably, shaking hands and taking coats. There’s very little licking or mouthing in the Martha example of the refined Ginger.
Daisy is finally beginning to even out in her growth. For a few weeks her front legs seemed shorter than her back legs, resulting in a butt-up stature that would most certainly not lead to AKC victories and eventual champion-hood, with its allotted glories and privileges for champion bitches. This unevenness was most apparent when Daisy ran, her longer hind legs reaching forward like a jack rabbits when she was at full gallop, her little auburn head pumping, tongue flapping, running with all her puppy might! Every time I saw her run I was reminded of the song for the Flying Monkeys from the original Wizard of Oz. It seemed to fit her funny, loping gait and has since become Daisy’s theme song.
I cut the grass the other night, riling up hordes of mosquitoes who were perfectly content to slumber in the tall grass, waiting for the dogs to step outside to pee so they could have a nice little snack of warm canine blood. The mosquitoes swarmed me, bumping into me with enough force that I could feel them. I moved quickly so they didn’t have time to land on me, avoiding them like I was trying to avoid raindrops. Once the old John Deere was fired up, the mosquitoes disappeared. This made me wonder if the bugs are dumb enough to be confused by the differences between the carbon dioxide from me and the carbon monoxide from the old John Deere. Although I suppose if the mosquitoes were truly confused they would have attacked the tractor and not me.
There is a deep-seated weariness in me these days, which bores down through my bones to sit heavily in my soul. I am exhausted and tired of everything, work especially, the house a close second. I am reading Edward Hoagland’s book of essays, “Heart’s Desire,” and I have found the perfect passage to illustrate my current state. It is a statement describing a mass of people who feel so hard pressed “that their main effort was just to disengage themselves.” That is where I am right now, trying to disengage as Hoagland describes in his essay “Of Cows and Cambodia.” Only without the luxurious wealth to be able to run off and buy my very own antique farm somewhere deep in the heart of rural Vermont.
Trying to keep from calling Daisy Ginger and vice-versa!
