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

When my boys were very small, we got a dog for them. Actually, I believe someone gave us the dog for the boys. Being the wonderful mother that I am, I wanted to name him something the little guys could easily say. My boys favorite book at the time was of animals and the sounds they make. The sound for the dog in the book was arf. So that became the name of our dog, Arf. I thought it was very clever and a great name, if I do say so myself.

We have had many dogs here on the ranch, and with dogs, comes issue. One issue Arf had was that he would chase cars, and bark at anyone walking by. Our farm is located 4 miles from town, surrounded by country roads. Our roads have a lot of traffic on them, in the form of cars, bicyclers, and people just walking by. On this one particular summer day, the boys and I were outside playing (I was soaking) in the sun, when Arf starting barking. I yelled at him to quit, and looked up to see what he was barking at. Yes, I did tend to yell before looking. It was a lovely lady on her bicycle, out for a nice 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 I was going to teach him a lesson! I headed down the driveway after him. So here is the scene; One bicycler peddling along down the road, one dog running down the driveway towards the bicycler, barking, and one lady (me, myself, and I) also running down the driveway yelling Arf, Arf, Arf!!

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

It was a little while later, as I was replaying the incident in my head, that I realized that it probably looked pretty funny. No biggy. No one was around to see me, except for the bicycle lady, and I didn’t know her, the kids were to little to realize what I did was a bit crazy, so 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 a chance. (I’m sure most of the town had heard it.) This brings me to the “continuation of the story”.

At that time, we grew 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 hysterically laughing, one of the crew looked up and said, “that was me!” I wanted to crawl under the sorting table and disappear. Crap, now I knew the bicycle lady and she knew who I was. Now I was embarrassed.

I did survive the humiliation that day, and to this day, the story still comes up ever so often. The lessons I learned from this, that I pass on to you, are……..