Oranges from the Sky

Lilah has this annoying habit of managing to see something, or thinking she sees something, scurrying around outside, while she is locked away inside behind glass doors. You might think to yourself, "why is that annoying? She should be praised for her great observational ability." And I wouldn't hesitate a moment to say, "shut your mouth!"

Because what follows is non-stop barking and pounding against a 5'x1' glass plane inset into a wooden door frame that I will eventually have to pay to replace from all the damage she has inflicted upon it. If you look carefully, you can actually see the glass kind of flex when Lilah stands on her hind legs and slams her front paws against it, barking incessantly the. whole. time.

Even when we try to block the window up with cardboard and chairs, she just gets on her hind legs and lets gravity aid her in pushing down the barrier.

It used to be more of a problem when the fence was all broken. But now that it's fixed, it's usually easier to just let her rush out the door and hunt down whatever it was she (thought she) saw.

So the other day in the early afternoon while I was relaxing downstairs using my laptop, I heard the scrabbling of feet and the slamming of paws against glass just seconds before the brain-piercing barking began. I pushed her away from the door long enough to unlock and open it a sliver before she squirmed her way past me and out the barely opened door, Ritter and me hot on her heels.

We race to the back of the yard, behind the garage where the phone pole stands slightly leaning. The dogs are sniffing at the base of it. Lilah looks up and watches the squirrel that's perched on the neighbors fence, it's mouth clamped on the partly eaten orange.

Now I can see what it's planning. That squirrel wants to jump, with the orange gripped in its mouth, from the wall to the phone pole, a decent foot away. Lilah and Ritter by that time are either sniffing the ground or looking at me, wondering slightly why I'm not bugging them.

The squirrel jumps! It grasps the phone pole, but has lost its orange during the trip. The orange hits unsuspecting Lilah on the side of her head. She immediately looks up and around her, trying to figure out the origin of the orange. I can't help it, I laugh really hard for the next couple of minutes as she keeps looking up and all around her, paranoid that another orange will hit her on the head.

For a dog as proud as Lilah to be paranoid like that for a moment, it was damn funny.