The rain falls heavy and hard this time of year in Southeast Alaska.
In my childhood, the sunbaked New Mexican soil couldn’t absorb a heavy rain. The streets would flood. The gutters would fill. And torrents gushed into all the underground burrows. I remember earthworms squirming out of the drowning lawns onto the sidewalk, so they could breathe.
Monday morning, here in Alaska, as I came out the back door with Derby, there were two slugs 5 feet up the wall. What did they know that I didn’t? Ends up what they knew was that it would rain even hard last night. The storm grew so loud last night that I went out into the garage to comfort Derby.
This morning Derby and I took her morning walk along a wet street in heavy fog. From a distance we could hear either Rose or Flynn barking. They are a pair of short-haired Yellow Labrador’s, healthy, friendly and almost white in color. Oddly we only heard one dog sporadically barking. Derby stopped at one point, held perfectly still, head high, looking in the direction of their yard from a spot where we had seen them before. Nothing! We moved on. We stopped at the abandoned lots at the end of the street and spent some time there.
When we headed home around the corner came their master’s pickup truck. Apparently, the dogs knew or maybe they have really good ears and recognized the music that was booming from the cab. I’ve seen my wife’s little Miniature Schnauzer jump up and run to the window five minutes before our truck (driven by her mistress) turned on to the street. It’s amazing the many things us mortals miss and how often we ignore that “small still voice” that seems to come in loud and clear to all the other creatures around us.
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