Yesterday, Jesse and I took a client to Lindo Lakes for a walk. We walked around the lake, and she and Jesse flushed the ducks into the water (big bird dogs), they stayed away from the geese (smart dogs, especially since they have a bunch of goslings right now), and they still can't figure out how the squirrels just disappear (that going to ground thing is beyond them, guess they're not terriers... LOL).
We also made a quick cruise through the farmer's market, one reason we went there was so I could to stop by the Indian food stand and get some veggie samosas and yogurt mint dip for dinner. Dogs aren't allowed in the market, but half the people bring them anyway and no one seems to care. You gotta love Lakeside. So I got my Indian food, and then I rediscovered part of my childhood...
One stand was selling mulberries; I haven't tasted them since I was a kid. As soon as I popped it in my mouth a wealth of memories rushed into my mind. It was like a sweet little purple password that suddenly opened memory storage, which hadn’t been accessed for a long time. It tasted just the way I remembered when I was young, and there were mulberry trees next to our house. Back then I must have consumed my weight in them every spring and early summer. They were then and still are one of my favorite foods.
My friends would come over and we’d pick buckets of berries. We would have purple hands for days, but it was worth it for the pies, cobblers and jams mom would make with them. Of course, we ate almost as many as we picked.
I loved to climb those trees and just hang out up there. Sometimes one or two of my cats would join me in there, especially if I’d brought a sandwich with me. We would share the sandwich and snuggle up there. I would hide in the trees, and watch the world pass by below. Occasionally, I would play tricks on people, when someone walked by, I would quietly say, “Hi there,” and watch them look all around to find the source of the voice. Unless I made another noise, most people never thought to look up. They would look around (some people would say something like, “Who’s there”), and then walk on, probably wondering if they were losing their minds.
One of my favorite past times was to read in the mulberry trees. I would wrap a blanket around my current book, toss it into the tree and climb up after. I would find my comfy Y branch and use the blanket for padding. Then, for hours, I would sit there, eating mulberries, and losing myself in a book. I would do that all year long, but when the mulberries were ripe, it was tree reading nirvana. I wonder how many purple fingerprints I left on the pages.
Of course, the birds loved them too. Back then we didn't have a clothes dryer, so we hung our clothes out on a line. The birds would sit in the trees, eat mulberries and then fly over and drop purple poop and berries all over mom's freshly washed laundry. Mulberry juice, even when processed through birds, makes a purple dye. A permanent purple dye, the sheets, towels, mom’s nursing uniforms, and the rest of our clothes often ended up with purple blotches all over them. We started hanging the laundry up in the garage, during mulberry season.
The berries also dropped everywhere; the soles of my feet were purple all summer, of course more than once I left purple footprints across the floors. Since the tree overhung the driveway, the berries and bird poop ended up all over the car. Mom said she hated those trees because they were so messy, but she loved to eat those mulberries too.
Once, when I was in trouble for having a bad report card, I tried to hide from mom in a tree. I sat up there and watched her walk around, calling me, and getting madder by the moment. My goal was to avoid punishment (a spanking) as long as possible. I thought I’d hide until she got over being mad. Then I would come home and pretend I had been off playing in the fort and didn’t hear her calling me. (The fort was a large shipping crate one of the neighbor kids found. We hauled it into a field and turned it into the fort).
Anyway, that was my plan, but after what seemed like hours, I came to realize it was a really bad plan. Besides, starting to really need to go to the bathroom, I could tell mom wasn’t “getting over it.” In fact, she was getting angrier because she was getting worried. Since I was up a tree, I didn’t know she’d called all the neighbors, checked the fort and my other favorite playing places. Even back then, when life seemed so safe, bad things did happen to little kids. I was about to give up, climb down and face the music, when mom came out with her secret weapon, our dog Snoopy. Being a dachshund, it didn’t take him long to sniff out my tree. When mom looked up and saw me… a look of total relief came over her face, but it was quickly followed by one of sheer anger when she realized I’d been there all along. I won’t tell you what happened next; let’s just say I never hid from her again, at least not in a tree.
BTW, the above story is a great example of why it’s not a good idea to punish your dog, or anyone for that matter. Punishment usually doesn’t work, the dog may stop doing that behavior at that moment, but he’ll often do it again later. So the dog doesn’t learn not to get in the trash, he just learns not to do it when you’re around. As a young human, with opposable thumbs and a partially formed frontal lobe, I understood why I was in trouble. However, unless you catch them in the act, and maybe not even then, animals don’t get why you’re mad. They just know you’re mad. I went out of my way to avoid the punishment, but I got it anyway, in spades. However, while that spanking may have taught me not to hide from mom in trees, it also taught me to be afraid of her. What it didn’t do was teach me how to spell, which is why I got the bad report card in the first place.
For more information about punishment, positive reinforcement, dogs and people read: Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training, Karen Pryor. Bantam Books.
I also recommend: Chill Out Fido! How to Calm Your Dog, Nan Kené Arthur. Dogwise Publishing
For more great books, check out our Resources Page at: http://pawsitivepawsabilities.com/Resources.html
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