Emma surprise
When Emma and I went on our walk today, on the bike path and trails down along the clear ditch by the RGNC, it was a lovely afternoon. The breeze was cold, but it’s mostly a sheltered walk. Only walking west down the path from Candelaria did the wind-tunnel effect make it really bitter.
As we crossed the wooden footbridge across the ditch from the Nature Center gate a young mother with two kids by the far landing stepped aside to let us pass. A wise idea, as it turned out.
Her older kid, a little boy of maybe five or six, came tottering forward as we reached that end, blithely ignoring his mom’s repeated commands to stop. And then he did stop, and his eyes got real wide.
“There’s a big dog!” he announced breathlessly.
Yeah, kid. No diddly. Listen to your mama next time, won’t you?
Actually I don’t think Emma would ever remotely hurt a child. She got along well with the kids at the home she lived at for a year. It was the other dogs she had a problem with. Still, I prefer to avoid putting such things to the test unnecessarily.
There’s no question that, at almost 100 pounds, burly and black with a shoebox head, Emma looks formidable. Okay, she is formidable. Most people just assume she’s a he. A lot of people admire her, some with visible trepidation.
They should hear me coo at her as my baby girl…
It seems the cranes have finally flown away. I didn’t see any in the field along Veranda, east of the RGNC. It’s sad, of course, in a way. But if they don’t go away, where’s the poignancy when they return?
That’s not altogether true. The Canada geese don’t all leave. A goodly population sticks around and produces broods of deceptively cute babies. (Deceptive, in that their parents are huge and scary.) But when I hear the wild geese flying back as the autumn air turns crisp, it always stirs me at a very deep level.