Here’s me and Harley looking at the sky.
Harley is staying with us and he is like a big animated teddy bear.
He also sometimes winds Rocco up which saves me a job.
Today I’ve been trying to explain to him the difference between Sky Chasing and Sky Groaning,
but I don’t think he fully grasped the intricate nuances of the subjects.
I’ve got them down to a fine art.
Most dogs never look at the sky, and only occasionally remember that is there
when they are trying to see in which direction a stick or ball went.
I watch it a lot.
I often go out with my head up as far as I can reach and study what the sky is doing.
Sometimes there are clouds, and sometimes they race overhead so fast I feel that I have to try and control them.
The best way of doing this I’ve found is for me to run up and down the path as quickly as I can so that the clouds slow down.
This is Sky Chasing.
Harley grasped the running part but just kept running after me, and not watching the clouds.
When I told him to watch the clouds, he kept running into me instead of looking where he was going.
He’s a bit bigger and heavier than I am, so after being trampled on a few times I swiftly moved the conversation on to the subject of Sky Groaning.
Sky Groaning is something I’m still trying to understand myself, and I’d hoped Harley might have been able to share some insights, but unfortunately it was all beyond him.
The way I see it is this:
Sometimes it rains.
Rain is A Very Strange Thing.
I bark at the rain because it can ruin a pleasant snooze in the sun.
Sometimes the rain comes from the clouds.
Sometimes the rain comes from the washing that Helen hangs up.
I run up and down under the washing line and notice that our blankets seem to rain a lot.
Which is odd, because they are always dry when they come back into our beds afterwards.
The swaying blankets drive me mad, just like the clouds, so I used to bark at them.
But now I Groan at them instead.
Helen calls it my Sky Groaning, but she doesn’t realise I learnt it from her in the first place.
One afternoon when I’d spent a long while trying to control the weather,
Helen returned from Being Out and came and joined me in looking at the sky.
She saw the rain coming from the clouds and the rain coming from the washing and she gave a very big groan.
The next day it was really sunny all day.
I was very inspired by this and now often practice Sky Groaning several times a week.
Harley said I think too much about the sky and should play more instead.
I said he plays too much and should think more about the sky instead.
Rocco was smirking at both of us again, I don’t know why.