I didn’t intend, and certainly didn’t hope, there would be a part three to my “falling tree, fence destroying, dogs escaping” columns. Wrong.
This event precedes the lightning snowstorm that arrived Christmas evening. Speaking of that, where were you when the lights went out? I wonder if an unusually high number of babies will arrive on September 18? (I did the math.)
Anyway, back to round three. The guys who had cut my tree down had done a Band-Aid repair job on my neighbor’s fence, where the top of the tree had landed. I was OK with the quick fix at the time, as I wanted them to just move on to their next victim.
But then after those crazy high winds blew through a week later, Kathy called me to tell me our neighbor had knocked on the door and said her dogs had escaped – again. This was their third breakout in the last ten days. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, they didn’t much like it over there. But that’s probably not fair, because old Gus, my terrier, when he had been younger Gus, used to run for the hills every chance he got.
So the dogs, Lucy and Ellie, I think, or maybe Effie, were missing, and the neighbor, was crying. She even mentioned that Ellie had cost a thousand dollars, which seems like a lot, especially for a dog that doesn’t seem to care for your company.
Kathy and the neighbor spent a few hours driving the neighborhood in search of the dogs, with no luck. The only good thing is no one had run them over. When I got home from work, I called the neighbor and told her how very sorry I was, and that I had someone coming to fix the fence; he just hadn’t done it yet.
“Uh huh,” she said.
Then I told her Gus had been gone three different times, for days, and we always got him back.
“You were lucky,” she told me, obviously not knowing my dog very well.
After I got off the phone with her, I called the fence guy and told him he had to be there in the morning or I’d have to get someone else. He agreed.
When I woke up the next morning at about eight, I saw I’d missed a call from my neighbor at 6:31. “This can’t be good,” I said to Kathy.
I called her back and it was good, however. The dogs had returned in the night. My neighbor was laughing, and I wasn’t being summoned. All was well with the world.
I went downstairs and looked at the fence from my dining room bay window. There was something about it all I had not noticed before. The parts of the fence that had separated in the wind were to the left of where my tree had done its damage. And, most importantly, there was a solid post standing straight between where the dogs had gotten out and where my tree hit. Further left, there were leaning posts, which on closer inspection proved to be rotted at the bottom.
Then there was where the other neighbor’s tree had hit. It didn’t take a genius to see that all three of us should be involved in the repair. But it didn’t turn out that way, for lots of reasons, really, but mainly because I didn’t push the issue. I was so thankful the dogs had lived, especially the $1,000 one, that I paid the $375 fence bill all myself. Just call me easy touch.
Hopefully, there won’t be a part four.