When you get a puppy from the roadside, you can’t be sure what you’re going to find. Homer is delightful in so many ways: he’s peppy and happy, free of solemn brooding of Arlo. But he has several idiosyncrasies that prove rather challenging. He loves, and I mean really, really loves, to bite our ankles with his jagged puppy teeth. Sometimes he gets a running start and just barrels into our calves at a full sprint. We both look like we’ve been sleeping on a barbed wire bed.
He’s also terrified of the leash. As soon as we clip it to him, he nosedives into the nearest brush and plays dead. Utterly unwilling to move, he gets his entire little mass onto the ground so that we have no choice but to surrender, unclip him and proceed with the walk. And then there’s the issue of his walks. In some strange twist of marital encouragement, Homer will only agree to walks if both of us are with him. Otherwise, faced with just one of us, he flops on the ground and simply refuses to move.
I suspect that we’ve quickly become hopeless slaves to his whims. But this hasn’t been all bad. We’re working on the biting and we’ve found ourselves walking together each evening. Last night we headed to the nearby Pinnacles for an evening, July 1st hike. I think we both like the fact that Homer has brought us together for these romps. We coo over him and look like absolute saps, delighting over his log hops and trail navigation.
But what do you expect, we’re a childless couple with a new puppy and it’s summer.
1 comment:
so beautiful! I love all those coneflowers. and little Homer sounds perfect. I wish I could give him a squeeze and watch him plaster himself to the ground and refuse to move. Scooter used to do that.
Post a Comment