July 6, 2013
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Morning Report
This fall I will have new coat that will make me look much like I’m wearing a small golden retriever: I have an entire wastebasket of raw materials sitting beside me as we speak. Riley has blown his coat. And I mean Blown. He comes up to press up against me I’m here, Cheryl and wads of the stuff fall off from him. Now part of our morning ritual, in addition to chest-thumping, you-can-do-it encouraging speeches and short renditions of Eye of the Tiger, Cheryl grabs the undercoat rake and brushes as much of Riley as she can find (given that Riley’s favorite brushing position is with his butt slammed tight to the floor and his entire body crammed firmly between my knees. I’m not sure whether he finds comfort there, or it simply reduces the brushable surface area. It is unquestionably his position of choice.)
We are enjoying a moment of peace and calm right now. No fools are parading their dogs in front of our house. No children are running loose in the neighborhood, shouting for no reason. No one has set off a firecracker in…someone just set off a firecracker. Still, none of us feel any deep need to dash outside and bark, and this makes everyone in the house happier and more content.
And we who live here are not eccentric old ladies. I want everyone to know that. This morning Nancy and I went out and had coffee and Nancy read her paper in lawn chairs strategically placed in front of the hen yard, so we could watch Henrietta, Henrietta, Henrietta and Henrietta do their exercises on their new jungle gym. Nancy had a wooden base for something left over from her compilation of found objects from which she built the yard. For a while she had a chair inside the hen yard where she would sit and commune with The Ladies, but this created a small black bundle of discontent on the far side of the fence. And the chair acquired its own decorations from The Ladies. So the chair came out, and Nancy but the wooden base inside the pen, and all four Henriettas ran to the base, inspected it, and deemed it a very pleasing jungle gym. They sat in it. They sat on it. They climb around its interior. They chatted among themselves about the wonders of discovering a jungle gym inside their yard. They gathered in a line on the edge of the gym and practice wing-building exercises, deep knee bends and unison appreciative clucking.
A few days later Nancy tipped the gym over on its side and voile: it was a whole gym!
