It’s September and the kids have gone back to school. One is in college on the west coast, one on the east coast, and one is still at home. Charlie’s duties have shrunk accordingly. She lies in this antique chair of my grandmother’s (without permission) and watches over me while I work. And then she falls asleep. We live at the end of our road so there are very few threats to protect me from, but that doesn’t stop her from barking at the neighbor’s dog when she sees it out the window (on its own lawn), or when other cars dare to drive past our house. The real highlight of her day is chasing Cocoa (our bunny) back into the house from the garden, when I let him out for his evening constitutional.
Cocoa has found a way to get under the house, where he goes when he’s finished galloping around the lawn and investigating the flower bed. Or when he hears a hawk’s hunting cry as it circles above his head. He’s domesticated, but he’s not stupid. Normally I send my husband to get him because there were a freakish amount of cicadas clinging to the bilko doors that lead under the house when I opened them a few months ago, the first time Cocoa went underneath. I’m not that squeamish normally, but those suckers were huge and looked like a blanket of bats hanging there vibrating and humming. Plus there was a seventeen year cicada hatch last year which had been billed like a B horror movie scene to me by long time Connecticut natives, and I was still recovering. From the stories that is, and my imagination. The cicadas didn’t actually come in Hitchcockian-like swarms as I was led to believe. The bulk of them ended up hatching in New Jersey I think.
Anyway my husband has fetched Cocoa from under the house a few times, muttering under his breath that he couldn’t get so lucky as to have the rabbit run away, or get eaten by a fox. He thinks we have too many animals. But when he’s not home I use Charlie. Corgis are herding dogs by breed, and although Charlie needs to be the leader when we go on our walks, there is some inherited biological herding bell that clangs in her brain on occasion and she will spring into action to chase Cocoa, or the kids if they are
roughhousing, or our cat Sugar, though Sugar starts a lot of those chase games. But Charlie didn’t really love going under the house for Cocoa because she’s a little bit scared of him in tight spaces. When Cocoa feels cornered, usually under the sofa in my office when I let him out to run around, or when he’s outside under the house, he will growl and charge like one of those rabbits from that Monty Python movie, baring his teeth and scratching furiously with his front paws at whatever he can reach, a hand, Charlie’s nose. More often lately Charlie comes out from under the house alone, shaking off dirt and blinking the cobwebs from her beautiful sloe eyes, looking up at me as if to say, “You’re on your own now. That’s out of my jurisdiction.”
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