It’s 7.51am and I’ve been awake for three hours. I feel bad about it. Getting to see the sunrise is a small consolation. Barring the silence, it’s like the sunset in reverse – and even then, it’s actually not that quiet. Every avian breast is filled with song or lust and someone’s already mowing their lawn. The roar of that one car that always has trouble starting echoed down the street a couple of moments ago and even after YEARS of half-hearted one-eared blind triangulation I have no idea which car it is or even on which street it resides.
I suspect it moves about to taunt me.
In the next quarter hour the murder of beagles shall wander the alley behind our house. An incorrectly applied collective noun for a triumvirate of dogs that are walked next to the fence of an inordinately Angry Dog that Lives directly across the alley from our bedroom.
Angry Dog rages and the beagles rage and the owner seems to know that everyone’s filled with wrath and I suspect he walks even slower, first along one side of Angry Dog’s yard, then the length of the yard along the alley. The beagles taunt Angry Dog and the collective canine rage tarnishes the souls of these no doubt otherwise Lovely animals.
Ah, but other memories return. There used to be a daily pillow sacrifice to Angry Dog. He had a friend that would come over and the dogs’ keepers would sit on deck chairs and throw pillows at the dogs and look on Lovingly with drinks in their hands as Angry Dog and Friend would tear them (the pillows, not the owners) to shreds. It seemed like every morning I’d wake to maddened snarling and look across the alley at two dogs skirling through what looked like freshly-fallen snow. The sacrificial pillow parties and the Angry Dog Friend seem to be a thing of the past. Perhaps they’ve run out of pillows? Perhaps Angry Dog and Angry Dog Friend are no longer convivial. Perhaps they battled. Perhaps Angry Dog Friend is now an ex-friend.
Perhaps he was thrown to the beagles.
And of the Beagle Murder, I know for a fact that one’s an asshole.
The other two are very sweet and enjoy rolling in our front lawn, but then the Asshole Beagle seems to lead them astray into fits of wrath, barking at cars, barking at me, barking at houses, the sky and one another until the owner makes eye contact with me, plays air guitar, yells “SLAYERRRR!!!” and pulls his tangled murder on down the street.
But here I’ve been reminiscing so much about how much I hate the neighbourhood dogs that I’ve not noticed that the birds have quieted, the wind’s picked up, the leaves and trees are whispering and so far the Beagle Murder hasn’t materialized. The day I’m already awake is the day they won’t come and I’ll begin to question myself. I don’t think it EVER wakes Kristen up. I never see anyone complain about this on the otherwise thin-skinned neighbourhood Facebook group. Have I dreamed them? Have I dreamed them for years?
The whole of Westowne seems to have rolled over and gone back to bed this morning. We’ll relish one last cool day before the coming heat. 90 degree days begin this weekend heralding another “hottest summer ever predicted” filled with dire super El Niño warnings. I’m not relishing it, but maybe it’ll be too hot to let the dogs out. And maybe when they ARE out it’ll be too hot to be that angry.
But that seems uncharacteristically optimistic.
(It’s now 8.19am and I hear barking from down the street, slowly approaching – I think Beagle Murder is just running late… but here are more photos from Wednesday at Edith May’s!)
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