The Case of the Disappearing Ball

On Sunday morning, I was playing fetch with my friends and clients, Buddy and Peanut. They love to play fetch, so we play together in the mornings before I leave for the day. We play in their large backyard. At the back of the yard is a dwarf tree or a bush of some kind, I know next to nothing about plants, flowers, or trees; so I have no idea what kind of plant it is, but it’s a pretty little thing. It’s also a ball eater…

So we were playing fetch, on the third throw, the ball bounced into the ball eater and literally disappeared. I am not the world’s best ball thrower; to be honest I totally suck at it, so I sometimes throw the ball to one place and it ends up in another. Sometimes the ball ends up going into that tree/bush or other plants, but the dogs usually find it. At first I watched the dogs search for it. Sometimes, I have to search for it too, which is what happened this time. After they’d spent a couple minutes looking in and around the ball eater, I went over to look too. I thought it had become caught in a branch, so I searched all over it (it’s a small tree, I’m taller than it). I looked all around it. I shook it to see if the ball would fall to the ground. Then I looked all around behind and next to it… no ball.

I decided to expand the search, to any other logical area of the yard where the ball could have ended up, and I spent a good ten minutes doing so. The dogs were still looking for it too; Peanut (a Chihuahua/Terrier mix) noticed a lemon in the tree next to the ball eater. She decided it was a ball and tried everything she could think of to get to it. She jumped at it, but it was too high. She tried to climb the tree, but couldn’t. So she ended up barking at it, until I picked her up and let her smell it and she decided it wasn’t a ball after all… when she smelled it she sneezed and didn’t want anything to do with afterwards… LOL.

Finally I gave up looking, so went out to my car and got a squeaker ball (If you don’t know about squeaker balls, your dogs are missing out. Contact me for info). I tend to have a small pet store in the back of my car, for just this kind of occasion. We finished playing our game and I did my morning chores before leaving.

All day long, I kept wondering about where that ball had gone. I hate it when things disappear into thin air… it sometimes happens and it’s kind of disorienting. My logical side says, “It couldn’t have disappeared and it must be somewhere in the yard.” My creative side says, “But you looked everywhere and it wasn’t there, so it must have disappeared.” When I went back that evening, I searched again, still no ball. I looked in places it couldn’t have been… and it just wasn’t there.

So, I have to think the ball disappeared… score one for my creative side.