Tuesday I got up at 6:45 AM, and by 7:15 I was in an utterly foul mood. I won't bore you with the details; suffice it to say that I probably would have slapped my own mother if she had looked at me funny, and not thought twice about it. All bundled up and looking, I must imagine, like a dead ringer for the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, I got Max ready to go out for our morning walk. He seemed eager enough to go; unless it's raining or he's really tired, he loves his walks. Grumbling to myself as I crammed doggie clean up bags into every available pocket on my parka, I opened the door and stepped out into the near blizzard winds. Grumbling out loud as the first blast of arctic air hit me, I pulled the door shut behind us and turned to step off the porch.
And that's when it happened.
Max realized that overnight a huge amount of The White Fluffy Stuff had landed in his front yard. He immediately went into this ridiculous butt-wiggling, front feet stomping canine jig that I've come to associate with unbridled happiness on his part. He poked his entire face into the snow and came up with a small mound of it on the end of his nose. Tail wagging furiously, he looked up at me as if to say, "Did you see this?! This is GREAT!" He then threw himself into a full-on nose dive into the snow that had drifted around the cherry tree, taking mouthfuls of the stuff and trying to throw it up into the air the way he does his toys. Despite my foul mood, I caught myself chuckling. Max responded to the slight shift in my mood by cocking his head and perking up his ears ("C'mon, this IS great, right!").
I decided that instead of taking our usual walk we would head down to one of the open fields at the bottom of the hill. There's this little stand of pine trees that sits in front of the party center. The place ain't exactly hoppin' at 7:45 AM on a blustery Tuesday, so that's where we went. As we approached the field, Max went into excitement overdrive, bouncing on his front feet and wagging his tail so hard it came all the way around to his shoulders. With his ears pinned back and his mouth open in excitement, he pulled me over to where he knew the edge of the grass was under all this new White Fluffy Stuff. I told him to calm down and he dutifully, if extremely impatiently, dropped his butt to the ground. I laughed again, because he was staring longingly at the empty expanse of snow, wanting to get out there so badly he was practically vibrating. I unhooked his leash and said "Go get 'em!"
That was all it took; he launched himself forward, stretching into this kind of cheetah-like run that he does. My Maximus is a fairly large dog, and he's got the long body of a Great Pyrenees (which he gets from his mama), so when he gets into a really good running stride, it's kind of impressive to watch. I stood there for a solid five minutes, watching him do laps in and around the strand of trees, running for all he was worth then skidding to a halt, turning on a dime and heading in a completely different direction. He would come bounding up to me with a huge grin on his face (anybody who's ever lived with a dog knows that they do smile), darting and fainting at me, trying to get me to play with him. We found a stick, actually a small branch from one of the pine trees, complete with floppy pine needles still attached (the needles perplexed Max to no end, but since there was a bare section of branch at one end, that was all he needed) and I threw that for him for a while. He would go rocketing past the branch, snatching it up as he went, usually without even slowing down. Sometimes he would stop abruptly and just shove his whole face into the snow, looking for God only knows what under the inches of precipitation that were so bothersome to me just a half hour before, but were now brining both of us so much joy. And that's exactly what it was. Watching Max tear around in the snow, I thought to myself that there should be a picture of this scene in the dictionary, right next to the definition of 'joy'. And I realized that I'd been laughing at him the entire time, and that I was no longer feeling any trace of the foul mood lingering from before. I think that's part of the magic of dogs; just by doing whatever it is they do, they make us feel better. I have never in my life met a human being capable of doing that, but it's come naturally to every dog I have ever had.
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