Nice to meet you, Neighbor.

Two blonde heads bobbed up and down in a cherry red, Power-Wheels Jeep. The driver was Little Legs and his passenger was Baby Brother, who appeared quite content at being driven through the yard, happily bouncing next to his best friend.

A black dog orbited around them, her range getting wider and wider with each pass, until she appeared next to the beehive. Her nose led her along the ground. She sniffed each side of the box and was in the process of sniffing the small opening when I waved my arms to get her attention and yelled.

“Get back, Coco!”  

The warning came a second too late. One of the guard bees found her and gave her warning sting on her rump. She raced off with the fur raised along her spine, she yipped and rolled in the leaves and yipped more.

Then she went straight for the road, temporarily insane from the sting and pulled forward as though by a powerful magnet.

“Stay here, boys. Do not come any closer.”

The jeep boys stood up to do their part.

In unison, they chanted, “Come back, Coco. Come back.”

She did not listen. Rather, she ran faster.

Meanwhile, a big, white truck barreled down the narrow, country road.

I screamed for Coco to stop and to come to sit and stay and every other command she might have picked up over the past year to no avail.

I clomped after her in a pair of slip-on clogs that were one size too big and threatened to roll with each little rock and twig.

Over the road and through the neighbor’s yard and back over the road she ran blindly.

A woman walking her two, well-behaved dogs pulled off to the side of the road to watch with anticipatory horror of what was about to happen.

When much to my surprise, the truck slowed to a crawl and pulled off the road. The door opened and a man in jeans and a ball cap that seemed like a halo stepped out.

He crouched down and the dog ran right into his outstretched arms.   

“Thank you,” I said closing in on the wild animal.

I gushed about the bee sting and the failure of the invisible fence and the boys in their jeep. He patted the dog on the head and shrugged his shoulders in a no-big-deal kind of way like he didn’t just save the day.

“No problem. Nice to meet you, Neighbor.”  

11 Cents

Little Legs sat on the couch in full cartoon-zombieboy-mode. His eyes were transfixed on a big, red dog that galloped across the screen. And although Little Legs didn’t have any Goldfish or animal crackers, he flipped something back and forth with his tongue. A flash of silver caught my eye.

“What is in your mouth, Little Legs?”

He extended his tongue to reveal a shiny dime which he then retracted like a lizard that had just caught a fly.  

“Show me again,” I said.

At first, he shook his head.

“Please,” I asked.

He grinned and stuck his red tongue out with the dime still perfectly balanced at the end of it. With the lightening bolt speed of maternal reflex, I grabbed the dime before he swallowed it, accidentally or not.

“My dime,” he said with a whine.

He held his hand out expecting the return of his treasure.

This time, I shook my head in refusal.

“Do you have any more change?” I asked.

“What’s change?” Little Legs asked.  

“Change is what you just had in your mouth. Do you have any other coins?”

I had to work fast to find out if we needed a metal detector or a trip to the ER.

“Just a penny,” he said with a laugh.

“Where is it now?”

“I swallowed it,” he said.  

“Did you really?”

“No, I was just joking,” he said.

“That’s not a very funny joke. I thought you swallowed a penny.”

“I did,” he said.

“Did you really?”  

“No,” he said.

“Where did you get the penny from?”

“From Da-da,” he said.  

Of course, I thought. The coins came from the same place as his sense of humor, his father.

Daddy Longlegs.

Trying to Leave

“See you tomorrow,” the boy yelled and ran out the door to meet his father. The boy wore sweats, a long sleeve tee-shirt and a florescent green fisherman’s hat that he was rarely seen without due to its dual powers of providing invisibility and being waterproof.

The guys were headed off on an adventure and Baby Brother was already loaded up in the car. Little did the boys know, the “adventure” was only a trip to the grocery store and a pass through the car wash.

The boy’s mother yelled after him, “I’ll see you later today.”

Her word crystalized in the air and disappeared like snowflakes on a warm nose; she was heard only by the dog who wiggled and wagged her tail, delighted at the attention. The animal was a black lab mixed with an Australian shepherd, a perfect blend of intelligence and energy… for another family… the woman always said when describing the dog.

“I’ll be back in just a few hours,” the woman muttered to herself.

The dog sat next to her and looked up with big, hungry eyes that begged for a snack.

“Let’s go to your kennel and I will be back to get you out in a bit.”

The dog sighed as the woman dragged and pushed and pulled her to the kennel; her furry legs locked in passive resistance as she stubbornly refused to cooperate with her imprisonment.

Winded and a little sore, the woman stood up and stretched.

Spying an upturned dump-truck, a rubbery blue popper and a wooden ball, she gathered up the toys and delivered them to the toy room or the-room-formerly-known-as-the-living-room. A bottle of water and a discarded pair of socks on the ground caught her eye, and she swooped in on them with a hawklike speed precision. They were her prey, destined to escape and return to the wild of the house in a short matter of time.

The ticking of the clock reminded the woman, she had to leave; the dishes, the laundry, the trash, the catbox, it all would have to wait. And it would wait.

 Mama had places to go.