On the Farm they had a dog….. | Livin the Life, the Farm Life that is

When our boys were very small, we got them a dog. Actually, I believe someone gave us the dog for the boys. Which is how we’ve gotten most of our dogs, come to think about it. Now, being the wonderful and thoughtful mother that I am, I wanted to name the puppy something the little guys could easily say. Their favorite book at the time was about animals and the sounds they make. The sound for the dog in the book was “arf”. So that became his name, Arf. I thought it was a great name and very clever, if I do say so myself.

We have had many dogs here on the ranch, and as always, with dogs comes issues. One issue Arf developed chasing cars, or anything else that went by, and barking at anyone walking by. Our farm is located 4 miles from town, surrounded by country roads and our house was located on a corner. Our roads have a lot of traffic on them, in the form of automobiles, bicycles, and people just walking or running by. On this one particular warm, summer day, the boys and I were outside playing in the sun (I was soaking in the sun, I’m sure ), when Arf starting barking. I yelled at him to quit, and then looked up to see what he was barking at. (Yes, I did tend to yell before looking.) There was a lovely lady on her bicycle, out for a nice quiet ride in the countryside. Before I knew it, Arf was headed down the driveway after her. Now, I was getting pretty tired of his chasing habit and barking at everyone going by, so at that moment, I decided I was going to teach him a lesson! I headed down the driveway after him. So, here’s the scene; one solo bicycler peddling down the country road, one excited barking dog running down the driveway towards the bicycler, and one lady (that would be me) running down the driveway chasing after the running dog yelling Arf! Arf! Arf!!

I’m not sure who was scared the most; the dog, who took off in a different direction, or the now fast peddling bicycler being chased by a dog and a barking lady. I felt pretty good though, Arf had stopped chasing the bicycler. I’d done my job. Life was good.

I was replaying the incident in my head a little while later and I realized that it probably did looked pretty funny. But no biggie. No one was around to see me make a fool of myself, except for the bicycle lady and I didn’t know her. And my kids were too young to realize that my reaction was a tad bit on the crazy side. But it was all fine. No reason to be embarrassed.

My first mistake was telling the family what I did (yep, I do seem to have a big mouth). It then became the favorite story of my brother-in-law. He, in turn, would repeat this story whenever he had the chance. (I am sure most of the town had heard it.)

This now brings us to “….the rest of my Arf story”, a few years later.

At that time, we grew seed potatoes here on the farm, around 100 acres. Every fall, we hired people to help us with harvest, plus every available family member helped out when they could. One day, my wonderful, helpful, brother-in-law was helping out, and decided to share the “Arf Story” with the crew. As he finished, and everyone was laughing hysterically, one of the ladies on the crew looked up across from me on the sorting table and said, “that was me!” Oh CRAP! I wanted to crawl under the table and disappear. Now I knew the bicycle lady and she knew who I was. Now I was embarrassed.

I did survive the humiliation that day, barely. And to this day, the story still comes up ever so often.

The life lessons I learned from this adventure, that I pass on to you, are………