One of the great things about dogs is the way the dogs welcome us home. It’s always a celebration. It makes us feel great to know someone is so happy to see us again — even though we may have been gone only an hour.

I cannot speak about goats, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, lemurs, guinea pigs, rabbits, or ducks – I’ve never had those as pets. I had cats once, and for the most part their reaction to our return was, “Oh, were you gone? When are you going to feed me?”

When the dogs welcome us home, it is always with enthusiastic glee.

When We Confuse Things

Sometimes we throw them a curve and confuse things. Normally departure and arrival are done through the front door because our truck is parked in the driveway in front of the house. The dogs know we’re coming before we get to the house: Mom says she can hear them barking us welcome while we’re still a quarter mile or so away. They congregate around the front door or look out the dining room windows, waiting for the truck to crawl up the driveway. When we come through the door, they inspect us and any packages we carry thoroughly to see where we have been, and bump against us to say “We missed you!” Then Cochise goes to get a big drink of water. There is a story behind that, but I won’t go into that just now.

But sometimes the routine changes. Our truck is in for repairs. We are renting a car while that occurs. The rental does not have 4WD or AWD, so it cannot make it up our steep, gravel, driveway. Marie parks over at the workshop and walks through the shop-yard to the gate by the pens. She disappears from their view for a few moments as she traverses the 80 feet of so between parked car and dog pens. When they hear her come up the long shop driveway, the dogs get excited. At first they didn’t know it was her, just some car going up where it didn’t belong and Cochise, especially, wanted to go out and drive them off. He’s good at that. After a couple of days, they started recognizing it as “NiceLady’s car” and wanted to go welcome her home.

Yesterday Cochise got a little turned around. Volt tried to help, but Chief wasn’t listening:

What happiness there is when the dogs welcome us home, even if one does get a little confused.