The dog is writhing on the living room floor and punctuating that activity with long, high-pitched cries. He is not sick, although he could be described as under the weather. In short, he got rained on.
We’d gone a few blocks on our morning constitutional when the grey sky began to leak. No problem. Rascal doesn’t care, and my coat has a hood. Then the rain started to pelt down. I put up my umbrella and attempted, as so often in the past, to position it to give the dog some cover as well.
Rascal has never caught on to how to do this, probably because the shelter doesn’t matter to him. He does not care if he’s out in the rain. He’s given to shaking himself exuberantly when wet, and also doesn’t give a fig about whether the shaking leaves him with one or both ears inside out. I, of course, hasten to restore ear-y order, as I know that inside-out ears in a downpour lead directly to water on the brain.
What the dog has figured out is how well rainstorms pay. When the sprinkles shifted to deluge this morning, Rascal’s head came up and icons appeared in his eyes. Jackpot! His particular dollar signs look like bone-shaped doggy treats. Once he remembered the payoff, he was happy enough to head home.
The first part of the wet-dog routine is the toweling off. Rascal loves the toweling off. He’s partial to firm attention being paid to his ears anyway, but having them rubbed with terrycloth? That’s bliss. I towel the rest of him, too, but the ear portion of the program is clearly the best.
Then comes the big finish: treats. Yes, that is correct. Getting soaked by rain leads to a payout of two treats. Oh, happy dog.
Rascal has now reached the denouement: the writhing on the living room rug. It must feel great, because this is not a short process. And the long, high-pitched cries? A squeaky ball. He takes breaks from writhing to chase his orange squeaky ball around the house. This ball is one of an indestructible set of three, the gift of one of our family members, that extends each piercing squeak over a period of seconds. There are no two ways about it; Rascal loves a rainy day.
I love a Marilyn day. My sister’s been visiting, and she brought her truck and her know-how with her. She runs a fix-it business in Ohio, and excels at figuring out how things function or fail. She’s also a woodworker. On her agenda for this visit was regluing a Windsor-type chair that I had dropped, causing some of the spindles to come loose at the top. She brought some enormous clamps with her, to hold everything in place.
But when she examined the chair closely, she discovered why it had come apart. The artisan who made it had made some of spindles too short to glue firmly in the first place, and tried to hold them in place with fine brad nails. Which splintered the wood. The whole chair would need to be taken apart, the spindles repositioned, and then the pieces reglued. Not a quick fix.
On the other hand, she worked her way through the local listings for furniture restorers and found a person in Ypsilanti who seems to be just the ticket. We took the chair to him, and he agreed with Marilyn’s assessment right down the line. We left the chair in his care, and it should be ready in a week or so.
My sister also repaired snags in our Berber rugs. Some were the result of rug trauma; some just appeared over time. They were all ugly, and now they’re gone. Your eye sweeps across the floors, the way it should, instead of getting brought up short by snags. It lifts our spirits. Having my sister around at all lifts my spirits. When you’re a kid growing up, you don’t think about there coming a time when you don’t see your siblings every day.
When Marilyn and I got back to the house after dropping off the chair, and opened the doors to her truck, a butterfly flew in my side. Articulately, I said, “Ooh.” Marilyn turned her head quickly to see what was what, and we just sat for a moment while our little visitor flitted through the cab and out the other door.
That’s the kind of everyday moment that families share; no big deal, but part of the texture of your common lives. Our family has many. I’m glad we made a new one.
25 July 2025