Day 53c: A far better Friend … (06/06/2019)
And so it was that I quickly came to the small village of Le Falzet — a village permanently scarred by the suffocatingly vapor-thick odor wafting up from the 2-3 inches of cow manure that was thickly pasted over the entirety of its small streets … 🙁 🙁 🙁
And as I came into the center of the village proper, the stench of bovine abuse was uncomfortably mingled with a local family of dogs as aggressively loud as the manure was wet & rancid. It seemed that the mother & father dog were determined to teach their child how to mark their turf and establish fare-base dominance, and yet I was having none of it — choosing instead to speak kindly to them all as I sauntered through and out of town. They accompanied me the whole way, of course, and yet when the parents reached the clear-but-invisible boundary of their defended homeland and turned back to verbally assault the pilgrims sure to follow, their child stayed right by my side … :O
I paused at this point and told my newest friend that I was headed onward and that he (or she) should head on back to his parents, and yet this admonition was met with the cutest of gazes and a remarkable persistence of presence. Indeed, no matter what I tried, Terry (the first gender-neutral name I thought of at the time) stayed right with me, and so I eventually shrugged my shoulders and walked onward*, with my newfound companion Joy-fully leading the Way … 😀
“All his life he tried to be a good person, and yet many times over he failed. For after all, he was first and foremost a human — not a dog.” ~ via Charles M. Schulz
*Terry was cute and sociable (very unlike his parents) and obviously intelligent, so I figured at this point that he (or she) would either find his way back to Le Falzet or be fluidly adopted by someone in one of the villages up ahead.
;