Dog Lady Days

It is my contention that most metaphors involving dogs have a very literal vehicle, particularly that sub-class of metaphor, the simile.  Just four days at home have reminded me of the truth in the action “to follow around like a little dog”.  It is both a pleasure and an obstacle to be accompanied by a pack wherever I go around this small house.  There is something marvellously surreal about opening the toilet door into the hall and finding eight attentive and slightly concerned expressions waiting there.  (It is the one room into which they are not allowed, you see.)

The puppies have a high tolerance for winter and rough weather and are happiest exploring the daily minor changes of the garden (or, more accurately, tiny mud-paddock with shrubs).  Their incursions and excursions lead to many exclamations of “mucky pup!”  All this will I hope prepare young Tommo well for his pending relocation to southern Wairarapa, where he will have the deputy rule of a garage bed and a very large lakeside to call his own.  Jackie is deeply ensconced in her Sockburn pack and will never leave us, while the search for the right home for Rosie (who most resembles not only her dam but also a small piglet) remains intermittent and not yet fruitful.  Meanwhile, Fern has come into season again, which means it is six months since this round of breeding (dogs, not people) began.  Sometimes, gestational time flies.

The puppies have the same run of the house and section as the adult dogs but at night are confined to their bed-and-pen, the Poo Palace, which is these days host to considerably less poo than in the past — as it should be at four months old.  Adjacent to the table where our computers rest, it is, however, increasingly a receptacle for accidental object drops.  If your loose power cord dangles into the Poo Palace, it will not be returned; neither will your charger nor your plastic ephemera.  Electronics plugged in are kept high and out of reach; it is the odd jolt to the cable laid idly by that signals its exit from the world of usability and its careful, nay painstaking, segmentation by tiny, high-functioning teeth.