You Know You Are Turning Into A Hermit When

Your dog has more company than you do. We have another dog visiting us for a few days. She is a sweet little Brittany called Babe. I'm not sure if she is named after this Babe or this Babe or this Babe or maybe even this Babe. It really doesn't matter because it doesn't make her less of a sweetheart.

She had been with us less than 24 hours when she did something that only a Brittany can do. Well, other dog breeds could do it too but only a Brittany would react the way she did. We took her and my two dogs up to the cemetery for their evening walk last night. All the dogs took off running the second their paws hit the ground and disappeared into the shrubbery that lines the west end of the property. I followed after them on the road that runs right next to the bushes and trees.

The cemetery roadways are slowly being plowed and four foot mounds of snow lined one side of the road we were walking on. When I walked about 100 feet down the road I noticed that not only had the road been plowed but a large section of burial ground had also been cleared. In the center of the cleared area was a freshly dug grave. Now, newly dug graves fascinate me and, normally, whenever I see one I have to go over and look into it. This time I considered passing it by because it was very cold with a strong wind blowing from the North making it feel even colder. But my need to look into the hole was greater than my need to get out of the cold as quickly as possible.

I walked over to the grave and looked in. At the bottom of the grave staring calmly up at me was Babe. Somehow she had fallen into the grave, something that my dogs had never done in their cemetery walking lives. She wasn't scared, she wasn't frantic, she was even upset about being in there. She just stood there waiting for me to get her out. The hole she was in was a standard size grave, which means it was about eight feet long, four feet wide, and almost six feet deep. I knew there was no way, if I climbed down there, I would be able to lift Babe out or get back out myself. Fortunately my husband was with us so he was the one who jumped down into the hole. There are advantages to being over six feet tall. He lifted Babe out and the instant her paws hit surface dirt she took off running to find Duke and Kate.

Anais Nin once said, "People living deeply have no fear of death." Maybe that is why what we see as a grave dogs only see as an inconvenient hole in the ground.