Re-Bonding With Basil

With a little help from Mother Nature in the form of a severe thunderstorm, Basil and I are reconnecting, and I’m glad about this. As much as I care for Roy, the idea that my dog, the one constant in my life over the last nearly five years, may have wavered in her conviction that I (and only I) am and will forever be She Who Hung The Moon was a very troublesome thought.

Roy left on Monday and won’t be back until Sunday. When I brought Basil home on Monday night she was happy enough, but far from ecstatic. I’d expected this, knowing I was returning her to a place where she may have two overloaded totes of dog toys, cat companionship, a courtyard to patrol and a designated dog area to rule over (as well as many dog friends and a random sampling of senior residents who simply had to pet her every time they saw her), but I was taking her away from Roy’s house. Roy’s house had a much bigger window to look out of all day. Roy’s house had a yard with so many flowerbeds, gardens, birds, bugs, and even a waterfall that it was the equivalent of a Doggy Disneyland. Roy let her ride in his truck and as it sat up much higher than my car, her view was expanded and somehow, at that elevation the wind on her face just felt better. Roy fed her people food directly from the table. The benefits of life at The Old Dutch Village Condominiums couldn’t help but pale in comparison. She missed him absolutely and I understood that. She and I were in the same boat there, but still, the matter of her primary allegiance needed to be addressed.

Knowing I had only a week in which to re-sell myself to my dog as The Greatest Person In The World You Could Ever Belong To, I had a fairly full agenda for us. Last night I’d intended to expand our regular evening walk, adding a full three blocks to it so she could literally sniff out new territory and add it to her world. My plans were foiled by the advent of a thunderstorm. Not just a thunderstorm, but a fairly intense thunderstorm that rattled the windows more than once. With the first cracks of thunder I was irritated. There went my plans. With the second cracks of thunder and flash of lightning, I looked down at my feet and realized Mother Nature had done me a favor.

Basil was shivering as if it was 32 degrees in the apartment rather than seventy. She looked up at me with wide eyes, her ears semi-flattened against her head, and I did what I always do. Picking her up, I wrapped her in a throw blanket and settled in with her in the big leather chair, keeping one arm tucked around her and using another to flip through the new issue of Oprah. We sat like that until I’d absorbed everything of interest in the magazine (I should be the best at ‘living your best life’ after many years as a subscriber), then moved to the couch as the storm continued and watched several episodes of HGTV. Somewhere in the middle of House Hunters, Basil fell asleep. I was out halfway through the $250,000 Design Challenge.

The good news about this is we both got a good night’s sleep, waking at four a.m. and relocating to the bedroom. The bad news is, we missed a call from Roy. When I’m out I’m out and nothing short of the alarm clock or a bucket of ice water is going to wake me up.

Settling into bed, I thought about that missed call, how nice it would have been to talk with him, and that in turn reminded me – and I honestly needed no reminder – that I missed him. So I thought about that and didn’t think about Basil too much until I turned out the light and saw her at the foot of the bed.

Not on her usual left side of the bed, but on the right side of the bed. Because it was on the right side of the bed that I’d left Roy’s white t-shirt, the one he’d sent home with me as a reminder to Basil that he hadn’t abandoned her, just gone away for awhile and would return. I wasn’t exactly sure it would work as a tactic, but I’d read about it once in an issue of Country Living and remembered years ago, Gertie (since relocated to dog heaven after a very happy sixteen year life) had been inconsolable unless she could sleep on my ex-husband’s dirty socks when he traveled.

Needless to note, she slept on the floor, not the bed.

Basil was stretched over the shirt, her head tucked up against an armpit. The truest form of Dog Body Language I’d ever seen to say she was irrefutably in love and quite content about it. Watching her fall back into sleep, I couldn’t help but feel happy to see her happy, and it dawned on me that perhaps it was OK if not one, but two people Hung The Moon in her eyes. Perhaps my little Basil, ever the diplomat, had never let it enter her mind to love one more than the other, or settle on any preference for whom she was with. Maybe she was just happy to have that much love in her world, not to mention the added bonus of people food direct from the table.

I decided that was the case: Dogs don’t question things, they just accept them for what they are. And it was a nice thought to have, as I fell back to sleep myself. Maybe I should spend a little less time learning from Oprah, and take a few lessons from my dog.