The Drapers vs. the shed

Summary haiku:

I curse the day that

Archie found a way to get

under the shed.

Whenever you move into a new place, you usually continue to discover new things about it for several months. Like the crazy nooks and crannies your cat adopts as hiding places. Or how dangerously slippery the kitchen floor gets every time it's freshly mopped. Or that it's impossible to hang the bathroom towel racks exactly where you want them because there's something behind that part of the wall -- steel? -- that you can't drill through.

But the latest finding has been made by our dog, Archie. Apparently, The Most Fascinating Thing Ever Known To Dog lives underneath our shed. Sure, Archie will mosey about the back yard and run around with Lucy. But he spends an awful lot of time circling the shed and sniffing underneath its edges.

So Friday evening, just as a crack of thunder literally shook my house, and as the TV channels all started flashing the severe thunderstorm warnings, the Doppler radar showed some big, red patches of scary stuff coming our way.

I went to call the dogs inside before it started to rain. Lucy came, but Archie was nowhere to be found. I searched the yard, called his name and for a moment, panicked that he'd somehow gotten out of the fence.

I'm not sure what finally made me look under the shed with a flashlight, but when I did, I saw Archie's body, flattened out, like someone doing a boot camp drill -- the one where you scoot yourself along the ground using your elbows.

Circling the shed, I could not figure out where he'd gotten in. The clearance was pretty miniscule, and he's a rather stout 17 pounds. But he's a Jack Russell Terrier, and they're bred to burrow, so he figured something out.

I called him for 10 minutes; he wouldn't (or couldn't) come out.

Even before the storm, it was probably a good 90 degrees outside. When I looked under there again, and he was panting and there was a string of drool hanging from his mouth.

Right on cue, the rain started to fall. Hard. Sheets of rain, not drops. That kicked up a bunch of dust under the shed, and Archie started coughing. Oh my God, I thought, my son is going to die under the shed!

I circled the shed again, looking for the biggest possible opening. I called him, and he scooted over to the edge, laying on his side. Still couldn't get out. So I decided I'd have to dig him a bigger hole. Of course, we didn't have any shovels small enough to fit underneath the edge of the shed, so I used the only other thing we had: Two-foot long garden shears, made for trimming hedges.

Archie's smart, so he got out of the way as I started jamming these shears into the ground, loosening dirt (and all the nasty bugs that were living in it), then scooping it out into the yard.

This went on for about 35 minutes, in the pouring rain, and I'm certain I looked like a complete psychopath. I'm out there laying on the ground, muddy as fuck (it rained so hard that the dirt under the grass was soft and muddy), impaling the dirt and excavating it from the growing hole. My hair was soaked and parted down the middle from the back of my head, so I looked like Cousin Itt from "The Addams Family." Mascara was smeared all over my face and cheeks.

(When I told my friend about it, she was laughing her ass off, and compared it to the scene from "Mommie Dearest" where Faye Dunaway took the shears and madly hacked away at her prized rose garden. Nice.)

After the hole was big enough, I had to bribe a panting and worn out Archie out with a giant piece of ham. Despite his travails, he still hated the rain more than he hated suffocating under a giant, wooden shed.

I was so proud of myself afterward. I thought he would think me a hero. The mother who saved his life!

Au contrare. Archie was filthy from head to tail, and happily prancing around like a renewed man after his big adventure. Like a teenager who had just been laid for the first time, or a woman who'd just bought 10 pairs of beautiful shoes at once. He even tried to crawl back under after he gobbled up the ham.

He was fucking smiling. (See above picture for an example.)

It's innate for Jack Russells to dig and burrow, I know this. But man, I kind of wanted to strangle him for a minute, or shove him back under the shed.

So yeah. We went to Home Depot and Kyle spent several hours boarding up the entire perimeter of the shed. Hopefully, this will be the end of it.

Meantime, Archie and I are taking to some additional obedience classes, because he needs another outlet for his energy and intelligence. We start on Sunday.