Snuggles

After two days of gray skies, cold temperatures and relentless rain, I'm feeling put upon and anti-social. I bundle up in my longjohns and crawl beneath the comforter with the animals, wondering if I can sleep until spring. I despise this raw weather and monotone sky with a passion. Everything feels pale and neutered and lifeless. My friend, Michael, leaves for Los Angeles in two days and I find myself half hoping his plane crashes over the Great Lakes. I take it back immediately when I remember I would then inherit his four unhousebroken, overfed and hopelessly spoiled dogs. Time to get a grip, I tell myself, it's just miserable weather and it won't last - 60 degrees and sun is forecast for the end of the week - maybe, I muse, I can at least sleep til then.

It is not to be.

Twice in the same day, the little dachshund finds a vulnerability in the lattice work and wanders off under the house and all the way to the street. The first time, I catch up with him in the next yard - cold, wet and muddy all the way to his ears - but loving every minute of this new found freedom. The second time, I discover him trotting across the street through every puddle he can find, hot on the trail on one of the neighborhood cats. By the time I corner him and scoop him up, we are both dirty and dripping and half frozen. Before I shed my wet clothes and toss him in the kitchen sink for a warm bath, I make the rounds of the back yard and finally locate a suspicious space in the latticework, just wide and long enough to accommodate a determined little dog. The next time I let him out, he heads straight for it and finding it blocked, gives me a resentful look.

“Into each life a little rain must fall,” I tell him righteously, “Now get your butt back into this house or it's back to the sink.”

I can tell he doesn't much like it - to make his point, he takes his time wading through the wet leaves and underbrush before coming inside - I towel him off and give him a biscuit and he makes his way into the sun room and curls up on the love seat with the tiny one. We call it a draw and it gives me time to take a hot shower and slip into a fresh set of thermals. Later, he will snuggle up under the comforter with me, press his small body against mine, on his side with his head on my shoulder, and sleep. It makes me feel that despite the miserable weather and the cold, all is right with the world.