Homesteading

Winter is coming so we thought Tempest might like her own cozy place. She sleeps inside with us but spends a lot of time outdoors. She is a sled dog, after all. Retirement doesn’t mean losing her zest for snow and cold. She’s been running more and smiling wider since the weather’s cooled off. Finally, she thinks, the move here from Alaska holds promise.

We don’t have a formal dog yard, but rather a yard that has gone to the dogs. I have embraced this slouching toward Bethlehem for the past few years, seeing in the overgrowth and random plantings both a relinquishment of human’s presumed power over nature and a deepening appreciation of the aging motif in all things.

It is in this place and with this fallen leaf ambience that my husband decided to put straw in a doghouse we bought for Punchy, another sled dog now in the heavens. The edge chewed by Swirl gave the doghouse its homey look and marked Swirl’s territory. He is too big for the doghouse, being on the taller, lankier side of the sled dog world, but the doghouse is perfect for Tempest, a home away from home, we decided.

Straw was spread inside the doghouse. This was not easy and required practically laying on the ground to reach all the way in. I didn’t get involved in this part.

Then came convincing Tempest that the doghouse was a good place to go. Swirl, because he is senior and entitled and possibly wanting to claim the doghouse and all the straw as his own even if he wouldn’t set foot in such a chewed place for all the dried sprat in Alaska, gets in between the Milk Bone and Tempest. Tempest hangs back although she is no sissy. They just have an arrangement, crafted over weeks of sharing space, and peeing on the same trees. It is not for us to know. Meanwhile, both dogs are in the house.

Sometime this winter, we won’t know when, a black dog will curl up all cozy and warm in that doghouse. Swirl will watch from his big dog bed on the porch. They will work it out.