Pocket and the Walks We Take

We are very lucky.  We live in the middle of a large neighborhood with a 10 MPH speed limit and lots of different places to walk.  Mommy likes to take different routes to change the scenery. We are all for that. A new direction means more pee-mail to read and stories to pee.

When my parents bought their first house together, it was in development across the street from the village where we now live.  After work, they would take our angel sister Blake for a walk around our present village and talk about how nice and quiet it would be to live here when they got old.  Some residents complained about my parents walking Blake in their village because they didn’t live here. My parents ignored the “Private Property” sign and boldly walked Blake on the quiet streets.  Now that my parents are old, and live here, they grumble about people who don’t live here waking their dogs on their lawn too. People change.

There is another factor to determine which direction we walk.  River and I know where every dog lives. Sometimes the pups are outside, or in a window, ready to bark with us, and other times they are hiding inside.  River and I bark so they know their friends are outside and we start the entire neighborhood barking. Depending on how much our parents want to listen to our barking we may go one way or another.

Our normal route is a quiet one.  We stay off the two main roads where most of the houses are.  There is also an area with woods on either side. It is a nice place to walk, and that means it has one big upside for us and a downside for our parents.  Other people like to walk there too. We think the only reason anyone would be outside is to give us attention, so we bark and pull towards them. Some of them do give us attention, but most of them just talk about how cute we are and keep walking.  Talk is cheap. You want to see the cute you got to give us at least a scratch.

If we go to the left, then we are headed for the front of the development.  There is a lot of common area in that direction but there is also a house with two dogs, and they like to sit outside with their parents.  If the pups see us, it triggers a cacophony of barking and even more ignored pleas to be quiet from the humans. If the dogs aren’t out then we turn around at the office and go home, but if they are out then, we get a longer walk, because Mommy doesn’t want us going past the barking dogs again.  On those days we walk on the main streets. We bark at every house where a dog lives and at every person walking. Honestly, the barking is more exhausting than the walking.

Mommy and Daddy usually walk us together.  Occasionally, Daddy walks us alone, and that is when we get a barn walk.  There is an old barn at the front of our site. We walk around that, up a hill, then go over a fence and walk along it, with the tall grass ticking our paws, as we smell everything, and enjoy the room to roam.  We love when Mommy goes with us but getting the fence walk is a treat.

I will say no matter what direction we go I have never gone on a bad walk.  Even a two-minute walk is okay with me as long I am outside and with my parents.




A day with a walk is always a good day.