Pets


                                                                                              PETS

Sam and Denise are neighbors who live diagonally across the street from us. Denise is a retired dental assistant, & still likes to talk about dental work and oral hygiene. She is also obsessed with dogs. At one time she had 5, but now that she is older (in her 60's) she is down to 2 Rottweilers, which are big scary dogs. She actually has a bird house that is shaped like a dog's head, so that a bird has to fly into the dog's mouth to make a nest. Both she and Sam are genuinely puzzled by the birds' reluctance to use the house. He has moved it twice, thinking that the birds just don't like the location. They have a wooden dog's head mounted on their mailbox. She had a small decorative flag made for the front yard with a picture of a Rottweiler and the dogs' names printed on both sides. She also has 2 flower pots shaped like dogs, with flowers growing out of their backs. At Christmas, they send custom made Christmas cards, with a picture of both dogs with reindeer antlers tied to their heads. And when they send a birthday card, they always include the names of the dogs along with their names. They have 3 vehicles, and the license plates on all 3 have some kind of reference to dogs. But we get along with them fine, and they are both very kind to us.

Most of the families on this cul-de-sac street of 14 homes have some kind of pet, or pets - most of them cats or lap dogs. But there are a few exceptions. The neighbor who recently moved into the house directly across the street from us installed a small fish pond in the front lawn with a natural rock waterfall operated by concealed electric pump. A small blue light illuminates the pond after dark. I don't know whether it's for the benefit of the fish or for any interested passerby who might stop to admire the fish.

The lady has two sons, both probably still in their twenties, but only one of them lives there with her. He is stoutly built, rather rough in appearance, but basically a nice, friendly young man. One day, when I was looking out a window to check the weather, I saw him appear at the front stoop with a 5 gallon bucket of water, which he proceeded to toss out onto the lawn. A little later, when I was taking a bag of trash out to the dumpster I again saw him again appear on the stoop, toss out a bucket of water, and immediately disappear back into the house. I concluded that their hot water heater must have burst. I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and sit for a while in my lawn chair. With 5 minutes, there was Austin again, emptying another pail of water.

Now, it had become a mystery because I calculated that, if he had been dumping water at that rate since I first saw him emptying one, he must have thrown out at least 70 – 80 gallons of water, and no water heater for a small home holds that much. So I asked Sam about it that evening when we were having our evening chat on his front porch. He laughed and said, “Yeah, they were changing the water in her aquarium. She's switching from salt water fish to fresh water fish”.

I said, “Look, I went to a doctor once, who had a monster aquarium in his waiting room, but it couldn't have held more than 20 - 30 gallons”.

His answer: “But her aquarium covers one entire wall in her living room”.

As for me, I've never been much of a pet person, although I have taken considerable interest in animal life at times. I once spent nearly an hour watching a garden spider weave a 5' diameter web, trying to understand her system – which didn't appear to be a real system at all, although it worked amazingly well. More recently, I took a fancy to a colorful lizard that would crawl up the corner of the house near the dumpster, evidently stalking the insects that loitered in that area. Once, he caught me looking at him, so he stopped and looked me up and down as though appraising me. Then, apparently deciding that I wasn't worthy of his attention, he turned away and scrambled off along the brick wall to attend to important matters.

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