Pickles & Dimes

68, 69, 70, I count out loud, huffing with exertion. I finish the path and review the expanse of yard, a white canvas waiting to be broken.

This is absolutely ridiculous, I think, as I start again. Stomp, flatten, stomp, sink, flatten. I try dragging my leg through the snow but the top layer’s frozen, a crusty ice shelf covering my own backyard Antarctica. Back to stomping. I speed up my process. Stompstompstomp. My legs burn. It’s like trying to sprint through quicksand. Again, I think: Ridiculous.

I intersect the second path with the first and retrace my steps, making it more compact. I’ll have to go over it a few more times before it’s solid, but for now it’s a start. The sun reflecting off the glittering snow has made me sun-blind. It’s cold out, yet I’m sweating. My nose is running. My boots are full of snow, my pants clinging coldly and wetly to my legs.

Shorty sits primly on the ice-lined deck, watching intently. “This is for you, buddy!” I yell from the far corner of the yard, as he yawns and licks a paw.

I’m doing this because a few days ago Shorty was trying to chase a rabbit and kept falling in the snow. He’d leap, land on the snow, try to take a step and then just sink. Jump, sink, jump, sink. The rabbit was long gone and when Shorty came inside, his back legs were scraped and bleeding from the serrated snow.

“Totally stupid,” I mutter, as I stop stomping and start using my hands to remove the giants chunks of snow from my manmade avalanches, tossing aside gigantic pieces that look like the state of Florida, New York, Africa.

I spend 45 minutes making a dozen paths, Shorty’s personal trail system. A single path around the perimeter of the yard, with shortcuts interconnecting everything. This way to your bathroom spot! Rabbit Scent: 200 yards! Joggers on the left; walkers on the right! Scenic Vista: 40 yards!

“That’s enough for today,” I say, winded, as I come up the stairs to go inside. Shorty starts to follow, then suddenly turns around and sprints back outside.

He stops, looks at me with his head cocked, and then runs around his newly made freedom.

I’m working from home this week, and I thought the pets might be a distraction.

Instead, this is what I’ve seen ALL DAY:

She’s supposed to be helping me edit documents.

She’s supposed to be filing.

And he’s supposed to be returning my emails.

Good thing they work for free.

Oops, gotta go. The youngest assistant just told me I’m late for my tug-of-war meeting.

We’ve noticed a weird behavior of Shorty’s: every day around 5:00 p.m, he’ll start shivering. It doesn’t matter if he’s in his crate, or walking around the house, or, as was the case last weekend, outside with me (when, after I told him it was time to go back inside, he sprinted for our wood pile and attempted to jump our fence. I literally caught him by the collar mid-jump.) At 5:00 p.m., he turns into a scared, skittish, shivering puppy who tries to hide under the bed and clings to your leg with his tail uncurled and slung under his belly.

We don’t know what happened to him before we adopted him. We don’t know if that time of day brought him heartache. We don’t know if he was abused.

All we know is that he barks at strangers (men, especially) and practically crawls into your lap (even if you’re not sitting and no lap exists) so you can wrap your arms around him and comfort him while he shivers and shivers, looking anxious.

By 5:15, he’s back to himself, like nothing ever happened, free to be a useful nap buddy who thoughtfully blocks the light from your eyes.

I wish I knew what happened to him before he was ours.

Sunny
Sunny has been a maniacal whining lunatic lately. She gets fed at 6:20 a.m., 5:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. almost every single day on the dot. And yet this does not prevent her from sprinting directly into your path of travel, carooming off your shin and meowing at top volume to be fed if you walk anywhere near her food bowl. On more than one occasion, I have almost fallen victim to her Believable Hunger Spiel, only to find that Jason already fed her five minutes earlier.

Her early morning begging is particularly annoying because it’s accompanied by closet-door pawing, exposed-claws face-jumping, dresser-pull batting, liquor-cabinet opening and bedroom-shade rattling. Any perceived movement results in her grunting loudly and galloping to the kitchen, and once she’s determined you’re not following her, angry thumping back to the bedroom so she can stare balefully at you and whine her displeasure. You’d think she’d lose some weight with all the jumping up and down she does to procure food, but no.

Abby
Abby has taken to voicing her displeasure at not getting enough attention by peeing on Jason’s sandal, the nearby area rugs and the hardwood floor. It is not a UTI, as she uses the litterbox just fine, thanks. It is behavioral and not the first time she’s done it. Since Sunny likes to be a douche and ambush her for fun and Abby dislikes Shorty, Abby stays upstairs every night. Apparently, that’s not cool with her anymore. So we’ve made sure to take an extra 5-10 minutes a night to play solely with her. It seems to be working. Last night, she came downstairs and napped in her bed, and then went over to her scratching post and looked pointedly at Jason until he came over and played with her.

Shorty
Shorty is in the process of learning a new trick: rolling over. He can do it, but does so only after much army-crawling to steal the treat from your hand. Also, he repeated one of his old tricks last week: jumping over our 6-foot-tall fence. Jason dashed around the block to search for him, didn’t find him, ran back to get his truck, spotted police cars screaming toward the park two blocks from our house, said a prayer, and found Shorty two blocks away (in the other direction) sitting casually on someone’s front step.

Luckily for all of them, they’re cute.

Not pictured: Abby, because she was probably upstairs peeing on something.