Reflections: Inside, Outside

I confess to being a little distracted. This is because from my perch at the kitchen table (I’m working from home, as has become the norm for lots of us), there are pressed to the back door four of the most plaintive, hangdog faces you have ever seen. Well, alright, three hangdog faces and one hang-cat, since one of them is, in fact, feline. For an hour or so they’ve been sitting there with eyes for none but me. Now and again one of them shifts a little, utters a groan, or sits back and presses a nose or a paw against the smudged glass in a transparent attempt to look irresistible. Any time I glance up or bestir myself to top off a cup of tea, they begin fidgeting excitedly. Tails wave, ears prick, tongues loll. But then, when I settle back down at my computer the performance ends and they all slump back into fugue state to resume the surveillance. Already this morning they’ve gone for a run with my wife, accompanied me down to the barn to feed the chickens, terrorized a tardy opossum that they managed to bail up in the fig tree, and been rewarded with a heroic dog’s breakfast that included half a roast chicken I found in the back of the fridge. In other words it’s been the sort of morning that you would think ought to constitute doggy nirvana. So, what more could these three dogs (and one cat) possibly want out of life? What they want, of course, is to be let inside, and they know a pushover when they see one.

The object of their affection is the product of an “inside pets” family. I was raised in a suburban house that had a decent-sized, if fairly tame, patch of backyard, large enough to accommodate a couple of dogs as well as my brother, sister, and me. My parents’ dogs of choice were Shetland sheepdogs, or “shelties,” a breed of pint-sized, long-haired herding dog well-adapted to chasing sheep (and Shetland ponies, presumably) around freezing islands in the North Atlantic, but less well-suited to suburban life in the blazing hot summers of southeastern Australia. So, although our shelties had room to run around the backyard, the shortage of Shetland ponies out there meant that where they spent most of their time was asleep on the couch, or in a pinch, under the kitchen table. This was fine by my parents, who apparently saw nothing untoward about sitting on a couch festooned with tawny dog hair; or stepping over (or sometimes on) an elderly sheltie passed out on a rug dreaming of stunted sheep. 

On the other hand, my wife was raised on a farm, where actual farming took place. As anyone who has ever set foot on a working farm knows, they’re usually dirty, muddy, odiferous environments that present quite the obstacle to anyone trying to keep the farmhouse habitable. They’re paradise for dogs though, and although there were always a couple rollicking around the farm while my wife was growing up, they would never under any circumstance be allowed inside. Now that my wife and I are adults living in that same farmhouse, and although nothing besides kids, chickens, and pine trees have been farmed here in a long time, the old, “outside dogs” policy still stands. 

Sort of. This is why our three—fresh from morning adventures that may or may not have involved digging up moles, dog-paddling around a pond, or tossing a dead opossum around like a gruesome frisbee—can show up at the back door and still stand a reasonable chance of being let inside if they have the right audience, and if their performance is good enough. So there at the back door they will sigh, and schmooze, and make goo-goo eyes at me until I finally open the door and let them in. When I relent, they’ll throw themselves around the kitchen in epileptic fits of joy, scrutinize the floor for dropped breakfast, and try to climb into my lap before settling down under the table to shed fur and dream of opossums. And there they’ll stay until you-know-who enters the room. When she does, all four of us will have to go outside.

—James Fox-Smith, publisher

james@countryroadsmag.com