A proverb claims you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Our dog has been busy lately, showing us the real truth behind the saying. That real truth is that you don’t need to teach an old dog new tricks. Old dogs are wily enough and experienced enough to teach themselves new tricks.
For the last little while now, our seventeen-year-old canine has taken to shopping the bathroom wastebaskets for used Kleenex, which he considers tasty morsels. Dining on paper products is not recommended for dogs, and the humans with whom dogs reside frown on the practice as well. Hence, we’ve adopted anti-DPP behavior and thought we had the problem, if you’ll pardon the expression, licked.
We were wrong. This week, Rascal taught himself how to tip over a wastebasket. He didn’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labors, as the basket made a fearful noise when it landed, bringing a human to the scene forthwith. The new anti-DPP protocol is to keep the bathroom doors closed unless the basket in a given location is too heavy for our enterprising mutt to tip over.
Our friends Sue and Lee had a bichon frise named Aimee. When she was thirteen years old, that cute little bundle of canine energy taught herself two new tricks. The first one was grabbing tempting bits of food from the kitchen counter. It hadn’t occurred to the household that a dog so small could jump so high. It hadn’t occurred to Aimee either. But once she tried it, she found it was a cinch, as in, that carrot is mine.
Aimee’s second trick involved TP. The adorable furball discovered that, if she grabbed the end of the TP roll in the bathroom and ran around and around the house, the TP would just keep on coming. It was great! Under and among the chairs, over the sofa, up for a look at what’s on the counter. Yippee! And that old dog, like ours, thought up those tricks by herself. We can’t help wondering what’s next.
We wondered the same thing when we looked out the window yesterday morning and saw the world covered once more in snow. It was as lovely as the winter’s first snow, and considerably less welcome. Not everyone felt that way about it, of course. Children still went out and built snowmen. Our dog seemed perfectly happy with it, but he’s perfectly happy about the weather on a daily basis. A customer at the Thrift Shop said she was delighted to see the snow, because she likes staying indoors and taking things easy.
“Besides,” she said, “it always snows in April. I expect it.” The general opinion at the shop, however, seemed to be that, although we have to put up with April snows, we don’t have to like them. In point of fact, we’d be happy to put our snow shovels back in the garage.
Early spring flowers are still doing their best. Snowdrops and crocus and winter aconite are holding their own. Violets have disappeared under the snow. Hellebores, though plucky, have been flattened. They’ll perk back up when the snow melts as, presumably, will we.
Other flowers are getting ready. Spring beauty and trout lily foliage has poked its way up through last autumn’s leaves in the Sugarbush woods. Two paths through the woods by Thurston Pond featured bloodroots this morning. The stalks were up, their big, fan-shaped leaves still furled around them. The flowers remained packed into white, flame-shaped buds on top of the wrapped stems. They looked like candles for a birthday cake.
My other friend Sue and I visited the bloodroot paths this afternoon. Lo and behold, the flowers were starting to open, despite there being many left in birthday-candle mode. They’ll bundle themselves back up tonight and be out again tomorrow. The flowers only last a few days, but they are worth the effort of seeking them out, and the foliage is remarkable.
Also remarkable are last year’s Christmas lights: a lot of them are still up and turned on nightly. At least one neighbor still has a Christmas tree up in the living room, also turned on nightly. This seems to be a year when we really need the cheer of the lights. We’re wondering now if people will leave their lights up and on through Easter.
A house on Georgetown changed hands recently, and the new owners are having a lot of work done. The effort is supervised by a Halloween-type skeleton sticking up out of a bush in the front yard. It will be interesting to see if the skeleton stays through Good Friday.
11 April 2025
Another lovely reverie, my sister. As to what’s blooming around here, the answer is nothing just yet. My day lilies are starting to show some green poking out from the warming soil. Now that the ice and snow are gone, I look forward to seeing the blood roots pop up. Still…lots of limbs and broken trees on the landscape up here, thanks to the massive ice storm nearly two weeks ago.