‘S a Dog’s Life

Visitors to our abode have to be vetted by The Dog, a mongrel big of heart, if not stature. (There’s The Cat somewhere on the property as well, whom, should The Dog fail, be our insurgency force.)

Summer – summer-proper, rather than the summer-in-name-only we had earlier – has arrived. As I hunch over the keyboard in the study, The Dog roams the house and surrounds, cycling through: the kids’ rooms where she moults furiously; the lounge where various breezes meet and cool her down; and the deck where she slow-bakes herself.

Sometimes I look up from the inevitably blank screen and envy her simple Dog Life. Of course, it’s not that simple, really – she has her responsibilities: she protects both home and family from visitors, strangers and hedgehogs; she’s a great receptacle for dinner scraps; and she gets us out of the house for exercise or play.

Sure, The Dog needs regular exercise (or she’ll be overzealous in her protection of home and hearth [which is not good in Auckland]) and is a social animal through and through (it’s us owners who suffer separation anxiety when we leave her alone for more than a few hours). But when the children are at school and The Goddess is out doing Godly Work, it’s nice to have her around – panting in the heat, spread out on the floor for heat dissipation, or sitting and hoping that I’ve forgotten that I’ve already fed her.

Yeah. Good dog.