Dogs Love Michigan. Cats? Not So Much....

“I met the neighbors,” David said, as I helped him step out of frozen jeans. He has been working for a builder of log homes, near Lake Interlochen.
“Jeez, I wonder if these jeans will stand up by themselves,” he said, and tried. They actually “stood” for a split second before collapsing, nearly crushing Woody, who scampered over to watch. He took a lick of the crumbled jeans, and backed warily away.
“And?” I asked, running my fingers under hot water. “I think I got freezer burn from your fly.”
“He’s Dick –”
“That’s not very nice.”
“That’s his name.”
“Oh.”
“When he goes deer hunting, he uses a bow and arrow.”
“Lovely,” I said. “You should wipe the icicles out of your nose before they defrost.”
I handed him a tissue.
“Hey, at least it’s a fair fight,” he said, wiping snow flaked eyebrows and blowing his nose.
“Sure, if the deer has a bow and arrow.”
“He’s from Massachusetts.”
“Really? Hallelujah. A Nor-easter. How bad could he be? He’s seen Boston!”
David walked away.
I followed him into the bathroom.
“Where is she from?”
“I don’t know. Texas, I think.”
Woody is lapping up the puddle that is forming on the rug beneath David’s pants. He backed away, cocked his head to the side, and wagged his tail.
“What’s the matter, Boy? Got a mouthful of rug?” David asked. “That’s m’boy! “
“You’re gross,” I said.
“”Hey, he’s fixed. At least he can get some oral gratification.”
“I believe the rug is happier than the dog right now,” I said.
“Anyway, his wife told me to tell you to stop by and have a cup of coffee with her some afternoon.”
“What’s her name?” I asked, scooping Woody up. He coughed.
“Her name is Annie.”
*

A week later, I knocked on Annie’s door, holding Woody.
“Hi I’m Dara your neighbor this is Woody my dog. I thought I’d introduce you.” I speed-said. Hey, it took me a week to get up the nerve to knock on a stranger’s door, for crying out loud – I was a bit nerrrvous.
Annie was middle aged, with dark, wavy hair and glasses. She wore a big, burgundy sweater that looked hand-knit, a fleece jacket, and very fuzzy slippers.
Woody squirmed in my arms. She laughed. Not just any laugh: a throaty “Ho-ho-ho-heh-heh-heh.”
“Hi, I’m Annie,” she said, and gave Woody a tender caress of the head, which he miraculously let her do without biting her. He hates his head touched. Napoleon thing.
“I see you and David chasing him around our yards – ho-ho-heh-heh – every morning and I get a chuckle with my coffee. David is the best, with those long arms a-flyin’ and just when he gets close, that little doggy dodges away, heh-heh-ho-ho-ho, and the curses are all over the place. Do you like coffee? Come in, come in.”
She waved us in. “Bring the little guy, too, of course!”
I stepped inside as she led me to her kitchen. “It’s so cold in this house you’ll need some coffee. These high ceilings – our first gas bill was over three hundred dollars and so we try to heat with wood.”
Doesn’t anyone use modern heat around here??? I am thinking, but of course I say, “We do, too.”
She poured strong black coffee into two big heavy mugs. An obese cat eyed Woody warily and dove under the couch. Woody’s ears shot up and he wriggled like a fish to get out of my arms.
“Oo, hoo-hoo, let him down and see what he’ll do. That’s Casey. Maybe he can get that fat cat to go outside.”
“Is the black and white cat yours, too? I see him prowling around your pond,” I said.
“Pouncing on frogs. Yes. That’s Felix.”
“Felix the Cat,” I said.
“Ah, yes. That would be he.”

***
***
I went back the next day, sans Woody.
“Where’s the little guy?” Annie asked, ushering me in the front door.
“Oh, well, I thought Casey – and you – might like a break,” I said. Woody cried when I left him. I felt awful, promising him I’d be back to play in half an hour.
“Well, my goodness, go get him! A little bit of stress will do that fat cat some good. Maybe she’ll burn a calorie or two before dinner.”
And so I did.

We talked about everything, always over strong black coffee, which we both loved. We talked about her past and mine. She told me about her sister in Florida and how much Annie loved it there, but “Dick would rather die than live in that heat.”
And we talked about my family in New York and how I wanted to move back there but “David would rather die than live in that kind of heat: high taxes, traffic, the prospect of me getting a job in Manhattan and the possibility of me, making more money than him, blah-blah-blah.”
After the Cinco de Mayo blizzard melted, when the weather started to warm up and the muck became a dirt road again, Annie would walk/chase Woody around our yards with me, through pine trees, under big blue spruces:
“ He’s here! He’s on my end!” she’d yell from the other side of the skirt of a mammoth evergreen. I’d dive for him, with sunglasses on so as not to blind myself from the prickly evergreen branches, and she’d catch him from the other end – most of the time.
His favorite spot to poop was just inside the tall grasses of the mushy, marshy riverbank. Then one day, the inevitable happened.
“Oo-hoo-hooo!” howled Annie, just as my head whipped around, Alien-like, from the base of the tree Woody was just under, just in time to see a mini geyser- like spurt of water and hear the perfect “ker-plunk’ that his little body made when he slipped into the moving current. And when I ran and scooped him out, sinking and soaking and stunned in the sludgy riverbank, his little pencil legs rowing in overdrive, all I heard was, “Oh-ho-ho. Hoooo-hooo-hOOOoooo!”
Something like this happened every day. As soon as m’boy would relieve himself of the mighty double ounce Torpedo, he’d rear up on his hind legs and take off like a Tasmanian devil dog. Dick and Annie had a little arched bridge in their yard that Woody loved to race over. In Michigan, as you now know, it is icy even in spring. So it was a great source of amusement to Annie when I’d be chasing Woody down and he’d invariably b-line it to the iced-over bridge and scramble over it to a wayward patch of grass peeking out of the snow on the other side, slip-sliding and gathering his feet under himself and, with the chorus of Annie hee-heeing and hoo-hooing in the background I, inevitably, would make a spastic slide/scramble of my own over the shiny little bridge over to m’boy who, by then, was winded and wagging and waiting for me.

***