Rural Routes, Blog Version

Jager, our sixteen-month-old dog,  has discovered that cookies taste good. So far we haven’t found any that he won’t eat.

Put a hand in the cookie jar and he is there at your feet. Bring up  frozen cookies from the basement freezer and he is waiting at the top of the stairs. If both my husband and I are eating cookies at the same time, he goes from one of us to the other, big brown eyes pleading.

We now call him the Cookie Monster.

One afternoon I decided that a cookie would be just the thing to go with my fresh cup of coffee. The dog was sleeping on the floor beside my husband’s easy chair in the living room.

Where to hide the sweet treat where the dog could not see it? I knew just the place. A place where women have hidden things throughout the ages.

I stuck a  cookie inside my bra and made it to my office chair just before the dog launched himself at my boobs.

“His head went up like a shot and then he was gone,” my husband said. “On the trail of a cookie.”

My husband wonders if Canadian Border Services would be interested in Jager’s skills.

“In case there are any dangerous cookie smugglers out there,” he said.

Picking crumbs out of my bra, I said, “That would be me.”

MEANWHILE, NORTH OF THE HOUSE …

………  the cats are guarding the bird feeder…..

OR

… waiting for lunch….

It’s hard to tell which.

ANGELS

In mid-September, my husband, son and I were in a car accident in the city. We were on our way to meet our daughter for a family meal; our wedding anniversary had been earlier in the week.

None of us were hurt – shaken up and bruised, but nothing more than that. We learned the value of passenger side air bags.

The car was eventually written off. But not before approximately two months of dealing with Autopac and attempting to get where we each needed to go with only one vehicle between us. Those are stories for another time. Or perhaps not.

When the decision to write the vehicle off was finally made, my husband made a special trip to retrieve any personal belongings that might still be in the car.  Among the items he carried home  was a garden angel I had purchased with the intent of placing it beside my parents´ graves.

‘Are you still going to take it to the cemetery?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I answered. “It has a different connotation now. Whenever I look at it, I think of the accident.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” he said. “Maybe it was our guardian angel that day.”

He said it partly in jest. Neither one of us believes that you can buy a guardian angel in a garden store. And the existence of guardian angels is open to debate. Some believe. Some don’t. Some sit on a fence somewhere in between.

There is much we do not know. But we do know that we were lucky last September.

Even if our car wasn’t.

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