THE PEACH PIT MYSTERY
Once upon a time, in a place and time not far from where I am sitting, there lives a friendly pup named Ramona. Sometimes she is called Bella, sometimes Bubba Puppy – depending on how smartly or un-smartly (not a word, but I don’t want to use the word ‘dumb’) she behaves. The obedience trainer warned me, “You will always have a two year old living with you.” And… we do.
Ramona (a.k.a. Bella, a.k.a. Bubba Puppy) is very much attached to my son Chris. When he leaves for work, she mopes. When he comes home, she is that two-year-old that the trainer warned us about. Luckily, Chris has a good handle on her. While he is gone, I must be the nurturing mother figure of a two-year-old… oh, that was such a naughty dog!! Oh, what a good puppy… etc, etc. To say the least, I am NOT her favorite person unless I am the only one home and it’s mealtime. She has a built in alarm that tells here when it’s time to eat. I don’t know HOW she knows when it is THAT time.
She has a fairly large back yard (by California standards) in which to run free. She is sometimes a barker. She will let the passers-by know without a doubt that this is HER territory. She is a herding breed (Border Collie mix) and she is protecting her herd. However, if they stop and chat with her, she will lick them to death. She really does love attention. The yards in this neighborhood are all bordered with fences. There is an access gate in our back fence where Ramona stands and watches the highway of human life. As darkness falls, she stands on our deck and is mesmerized by the car lights going by. Later in the evening she chats with the other canines within ear-shot (hers, not ours). She is let outside just before out bedtime with hopes that there will be no need to get up during the night for a trip outside.
The neighbor to our north has a yard full of trees. Every summer the peach tree (in the back corner) bears its juicy fruit. Many, many people walking along the street at the back of our yard stop and climb the neighbor’s fence to pick the fruit in the tree (yesterday a couple of peach thieves broke that fence). If Ramona is out, she barks at them. Bubba loves the fruit… Bella doesn’t know right from wrong with many things – especially peaches.
Since it has been peach time, I have been waking to painfully stepping on a peach pit on my way to the kitchen… or stumbling over a broken pit in the living room or in the sunroom. Every morning it is something to do with peach pits – at least one, sometimes more. One morning I heard her trying to chew on it in the hallway where the bedrooms are (crunch, crunch). Just the sound hurt my teeth and jaw.
Now these wake up calls are usually before 6 a.m. My normal rise and shine time is between 7 and 7:30. But since these peach pit mysteries began, I am not sleeping at all well. (This time has changed as I am up by 6 a.m. these days to get my son to work... our second car ceased operating in September.)
Where, in the name of all that is Ramona, is she getting these pits?? This has really stumped us. Have the squirrels that constantly antagonize Ramona been stashing these pits for the winter, and Ramona found their stash? It just had to be the frickin’ squirrels. They have been trying to get back at us ever since we had THEIR tree taken down before it fell down.
Then, one morning, about 5 a.m., I heard something strange… I couldn’t place the noise. But when I turned the hall light on, you guessed it, another peach pit!!!
This pit lay in a pool of saliva (a large pool of saliva). AH HA!!! That dumb Bubba Puppy is eating any peach she can find before coming in at bedtime. In the middle of the night she regurgitates the pit and VOILA! I step on the pit and incur the pain of the pit. OK… so now we know the source. I will take care of that. We have a 30 foot lead line left over from her training. Before Chris left for work this morning, he attached that lead line to the bottom rail of our deck stair railing. That was at 7:30 a.m. At 8:30 a.m. I heard her out there barking at a guy on a bicycle. Now… how could she be at the back gate?? The lead line is not that long. OH BUBBA PUPPY!! I stepped out onto the deck. There at the door was an uneaten peach – for me? And there was Bubba with about 6 inches of the lead line hanging from her collar. Darn dog had chewed through the line and set herself free. And, in the process, had found another peach.
The peach was thrown away and, of course, Ramona moped away the rest of the day on the cool kitchen floor. I hope that tree dies this winter. And then the city decided to beautify the easement that runs across the back property of us and many of our neighbors (perhaps another blog subject?).
Thanks for stopping by... hope your days is just grand.
