Shrill

My little dog is among my favorite companions, and truly she is well-behaved most of the time I'm working from home. It's kind of amazing that she understands that even though I'm right in front of her, I can't play or have her in my lap while I'm working. So she wanders around the house -- and outdoors, if the weather's nice enough -- and leaves me to it. Sometimes she will bark once or twice if she hears a noise out front. It's nice of her to warn me, although the noise is usually just a neighbor closing a car door.

This afternoon, when I was in my eighth hour of scoring handwritten essays, one after the other, all on the same topic, and ready to fall over from the tedium of it, she started barking and wouldn't stop. It's hard to get the full effect of this without experiencing it. I have wood floors and high ceilings. Small dogs tend to have high-pitched barks anyway, and those factors only exacerbate the sheer shrillness of it. Five minutes of this was way more than enough, so I got up to investigate. No one at the door or in the yard. Nothing out of the ordinary as far as I could tell. She stopped for about two minutes and started up again.

Finally I saw where her gaze was directed. (She wasn't brave enough to get out from under her blanket on the sofa, so she just sat, stared, and barked.) One of my favorite suns sits atop a small table near my piano. It's been there for at least two years; before that it was in my kitchen. (I think I shared a picture of it a long time ago, but I can't find one now.) It's a weird guy with a huge sun-head, big hands, and skinny legs. If she had never seen him before, I could understand why she was concerned (he is, perhaps, odd, but I love him) but he has been here longer than she has. She should have noticed him by now, certainly.

I took him off the table and put him on the floor so she could see he wasn't a threat. She stopped barking but wouldn't go near him. She even hid behind a chair to put something tangible between the two of them. Still, she looked and looked, and when I put him back on the table, she started barking again. Once more, I walked away from the essays and repeated the entire process of letting her check him out. She didn't, but she finally stopped barking. I finished the last ten minutes of my shift in peace.

Now my sun-man is back on the table, and Mazie is curled up in yet another chair, this one a little farther from sun-man's table. She no longer seems concerned. Maybe it was just the way the (actual) sun was hitting his crazy eyes. I don't know, but I'm grateful for the quiet.