The Dog Days of Summer

Our grandson is staying at our house for a couple of days, while his Dad takes a short trip. Our granddog is here, too. Dante is an affectionate Boxer who has always wondered why Jao comes to visit us nearly every week. It does not seem fair, so this time our Wonder Grandson and our Wonder Granddog came together.

From a dog's point of view, staying overnight is not so much a slumber party as it is a new yard with new trees and bushes. It is where javelinas have been, with a delicate suggestion of coyote and rabbit in the breeze. It is the vain hope that the rules will be different in a different house, and that he will be invited to dinner. The habits of home are not transferable, so Dante hides his small anxieties of visiting in a strange house by staying close to us: by staying underfoot-close to us. We assure him we love him, and would he please move!

Jao sleeps in our guest room, when he stays overnight. Mari and I eased into place in our own room, thinking how pleasant it is to have a comfortable bed, and needing it, when--like a sixty-five pound feed sack--Dante landed dead center in the bed! He was not amenable, either to reasonable argument or to a shoving match: Boxers, like defensive linemen, uses his front paws probably illegally, but effectively. He was not to be shoved off balance.

"Leave him!", Mari advised, speaking from a maternal wisdom that completely evaded me: "He will soon hop down."

He did not soon hop down. He settled down. He settled sixty-five pounds down. He did not demand space or a place. He just occupied whatever space we unintentionally abandoned just by rolling over, or breathing out. I do not know how I did it, but I ceded the territory where my legs usually are to the dog. I protested, wriggling my legs beneath the comforter, and Dante edged into the space like a flood tide into the Sound, like a rock compacting loose soil, like warm lava creating a whole new headland.

Mari found me in the morning, in my chair in the living room, curled up as comfortably as a stick in a staircase. She had moved into the room with Jao. Dante stretched out alone, on our bed.

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