More Delights and Disdains . . .
of a diminutive nature of late . . . Number 14
Disdains:
Trying to ignore that my eyesight has gotten worse after years of being statically bad. Now, I don’t mean that I am going blind though I have been told to expect cataract surgery sometime in the next couple of years. Parkinson’s impacts those tiny muscles that keep your eyes lined up on various apples, targets and objects of desire.
Delights:
Taking Otto the Dachshund’s to his annual vet visit and suddenly realizing that he is 60 in human years. He is a lively elder dog that still manages to climb onto the dining room table when I am not looking. His agility is mainly due to me keeping his weight down, unlike Abbey, one of his dachshund predecessors whom my mother fattened up with a daily diet of skillet fried hotdogs. Irony knows no bounds.
Remembering other dogs in my life in no particular order:
Lilli the black and tan Dachshund. She was Otto’s sister who together fought a coyote and lost. Otto survived with bite marks. Lilli didn’t.
Smiley the black Labrador. He was a gift from a girlfriend and outlasted the relationship by ten years. He, like me, developed cataracts as he aged but his bad eyes did not stop him from dragging a pine snake out of a brush pile and killing it during one of our walks in the woods.
Claire the lemon and white Bassett Hound. I rescued her from a traumatizing breeder who had left her with a nervous condition. She loved to run in huge figure eights in my front yard.
Abbey the chocolate and tan Dachshund. I bought her ostensibly for my mother on a Mother’s Day weekend but really she was my dog. My mother was a notorious dog advocate and spoiled Abbey as I mentioned above. After my mother’s heart attack, Abbey moved in with me and spent her last years losing weight and chasing mice in the corn patch next door.
Belle the Redbone Coonhound. I rescued her after she got lost from a hunter. A woman tried to steal her from my yard until my neighbor intervened. In the resulting chaos, Belle was hit by a car while the woman got away.
Lucy the black and tan Dachshund. My sister rescued her from a dog’s life down in Conestee just south of Greenville - a bad part of town before gentrification. I was young when Lucy arrived thereby setting me up for a lifelong attachment to these long dogs. They are smart but very stubborn; their owners more of the latter than the former.
Hearing the sounds of Springtime in the Blue Ridge countryside - bees buzzing, birds chirping, tractors plowing and the rapid gunshots from my neighbor’s target range - hopefully using coyote-shaped targets.