Goodbye Grass

This weekend I mulched my backyard. "What's she doing mulching her backyard in the middle of winter?" you might ask yourself. Good question.

Sometime this fall, my grass packed its bags and left. It snuck out in the dead of night in small clumps, until all of a sudden, there wasn't any. I can't say that I blame it. It can't be pleasant being dug all to hell and constantly trampled by packs of wild dogs (ok, two wild dogs, it just SOUNDS like there's more). The grass made the smart decision to go.

So the "grassed part" of my backyard (as opposed to the "treed part") became a frozen tundra. Until Friday, when it started to thaw. Then it became the oozing mud flat. I decided drastic action needed to be taken. I headed to the Depot for some weed block fabric and bags of mulch (a temporary fix, but like I said, drastic action needed to be taken).

So on Sunday, when Murphy returned from her Winter break, the dogs had a brand new playground.

That night, I received an email from Rachel asking if I had seen Murphy's collar. Ray loves to grab Muprhy by the collar and try to rip it off her neck, so Rachel was pretty sure it was somewhere in the backyard.

The next morning Ray and I headed outside to search for the missing fashion accessory. I looked in the mulch and he searched the treed area. I pretty quickly found the item in question and bent over to pick it up. It was undamaged. Ray hadn't chewed through it, he had cleverly unclipped the clip.

When I picked up the collar, the tags gave a soft jingle. Ray went crazy, tossing this way and that searching for his friend. He couldn't figure out how she had snuck in without him knowing. I watched him, my heart breaking just a bit. (It reminded me of the time I took his sister, Lacey's, dog tags out of a baggie and he went bonkers). I stood still and shook the tags until Ray could locate them. I let him sniff the collar. He still wasn't convinced that Murphy wasn't somewhere around and spent a bit more time trying to find her. I palmed the tags so that they wouldn't jingle and went back in the house. Ray followed me a short time later.

He was walking through his office in the front hall when he (literally) tripped over his bone. Ray's tail started to wag and he joyfully picked it up and tossed it in the air. My heart stopped breaking as I thought of the flip side to being a blind dog. Everything is a suprise (sometimes a painful suprise but a suprise nonetheless) . When you find something that you didn't know was there, everyday is Christmas. Ray lives in the moment, and right now, at this moment, he was loving life.