In addition to having a few bird feeders in front of our front deck here at the house, we also tend to keep a bowl full of food — various seeds and leftovers we humans don’t want to eat — on our porch itself. Birds, squirrels, raccoons, and even the odd cat come by and keep us company, and in addition to making things more active around here, it helps us to feel better. Only rarely do we have stray dogs in the neighbourhood, especially after the police went around to the dog owners around here and told them that the leash laws were about to be enforced a lot more strictly than they were before. Even when the dogs do come, they don’t tend to care for the food we put out there, and we can usually scare them away quite easily because they’re rather timid.

Imagine how we felt yesterday, then, when not one but two huge black rottweilers — easily as big as I am — came bounding up to our front deck and started eating from our animal bowl. They had no collars or tags on them, and no amount of yelling at them or banging on the glass door separating the house from the porch would make them go away. They weren’t barking or looking mean at all, but to have two dogs of that size suddenly pop up on our deck was more than a little disconcerting. We called our local police, and they said that they would send someone down as soon as they could to look into the matter. Given how quickly the first officer showed up, I’m guessing he probably left the station just as soon as Mom got done calling him.

However, that wasn’t quick enough. Mom went back towards the door to yell at the dogs some more to get them to disperse, at which point one of the dogs raised up on his hind legs and used his front paws to claw loudly on the front window. At this point Mom screamed bloody murder, and I can’t blame her in the slightest because I probably would have done the same thing. If this house hadn’t been rebuilt a few years back, the dog probably could have pushed through the glass just by his weight alone, and even if the dogs were friendly we still would have had the issue of all that broken glass getting on Mom. Eventually the police officer called the county dog warden, who came by and took both dogs away, but not before I’d done a fair bit of screaming myself to try to get the dogs to leave.

Any episode like this, in and of itself, would have been difficult to deal with. What made this one all the worse for me, though, was that as Mom started screaming, all I could think about was her having a heart attack or seizure or something like that. I probably would have thought about that stuff no matter what, but for a few seconds there — and like the old cliché goes, they seemed like an eternity — I was thinking about the possibility of losing Mom less than four months after I lost Dad. I harbour no illusions of Mom living to be 100 or anything close to that, and I know that I will never fully "get over" Dad’s death, but I need Mom more than ever now, and if I were to lose her I don’t know what I would do. The next time there’s a dog on the loose, no matter how big or small, cute or scary, I’m calling the cops, because I don’t want to have to deal with another situation like that ever again.