Past Curfew
So far, I’ve yet to experience the wonders of having a child of my own. However, I have just experienced the feeling a parent has for a child out past curfew.
You see, we had a strong set of thunderstorms last night and when I finally dragged myself out of bed at around 9am this morning, I discovered that one of our trees in the backyard had split. Half of it was still standing, but the other half had landed on the back fence destroying about 10-15 feet of it.
In the wake of this destruction was left a hole in the fence that I could walk through. Hence, our border collie, Jack, also discovered this new egress that led to a whole new world.
Yeah, we had no idea when he had left our property and, upon doing a search of the neighborhood by car, had no clue where he had gone. We still had to leave today to go to church services so Amy left him a bowl of food and two of his favorite treats sticking out of the top of it.
We got home late and the bowl was untouched. I then started almost hourly checks of the back porch to see if the bowl had been touched.
Finally, at midnight, I was rewarded with the sight of both treats being gone. I opened the back door and Jack ran up to me out of the dark.
Talk about relief. I was going to have a tough time sleeping tonight due to his absence and not knowing if he was okay or not, if he was being held against his will by someone else, etc. I knew then a taste of what it is like to be a parent (of course, it’s ten times worse then… but at least you can chew out the kid who comes home late whereas our dog would have not understood what he had done wrong).
Instead of giving him a tongue-lashing, Amy kept him in the house while I made preparations to have him tied up on the back porch with a cable long enough to allow him relative freedom over a small portion of the yard. That being done, I tied him up, gave him another bowl of wet food (initially he only had dry food), and decided to type up this post before calling it a night.
Now I just have to call our insurance agent about the damage and see if it’ll affect our insurance costs or if we can get it done cheaper on our own. Ugh. Well, g’night.
