Hi guys, this is a post about Maggie.
As nearly all of you know, Maggie is our deaf rescue bulldog. She has one big scar and lots of other small ones, no teeth, ragged ears, an amputated tail, and many other reminders from her days as a puppy mill mama, but she lives a life of well-earned luxury now.
She is also the sweetest wrinkled little ball of love that there ever was and I love her with my whole heart.
Maggie has NO survival skills.
She can't see out of one eye and can't hear anything at all. Her nose is smooshed and her olfactory abilities are meager at best. She seems to smell the world through her tongue, occasionally licking her way around the kitchen floor just to check to see if any crumbs have fallen.
Sometimes foods fall right next to her and she has absolutely no idea, sighing heavily and dreaming of handouts while napping inches away.
She spends most of her day sleeping in odd positions, wrinkles pooling from gravity, absolutely exhausted from carrying her big head around each minute she's awake.
She dutifully watches squirrels with Moose every morning between naps, but we're sure she's never actually seen one.
She likes to hang out on our front porch watching the world go by and saying hi to friends. The one time she wandered off, she was lost and had given all hope by the time she reached our next-door neighbor's yard. Curling up in the sun, lost forever, I was waving my arms and calling her name from 6 feet away, but she was facing the wrong way and thus in an entirely different universe she was certain she'd never seen before.
She frequently walks into the glass storm door and doesn't understand she has to move for us to be able to pull it open and let her through.
We have to monitor her water drinking and stop her along the way, because left to her own devices she will drink until her stomach is so full she throws it all back up.
We wipe her folds and loose skin nightly, regularly apply ear cleanses, saline drops, and/or antibiotic ointments, and, despite having 3 potty trained children, we still have to keep baby wipes on hand because sometimes she needs a wipe post-potty break.
The point is, she requires a lot of care from her humans to simply exist day-to-day and would not last long in the wild.
And the only thing she hunts are spots of sunshine.
But, on Tuesday of this week, she had one shining moment as a forager and provided a tasty meal for herself all on her very own.
To set the stage: Landon had ridden his bike to our little neighborhood grocery store a week ago to buy me a rotisserie chicken for dinner (I'm getting hints of what it will be like to have a kid who can drive and it is GREAT) and apparently decided to buy himself some candy and honeybuns at the same time. He ate the candy, but full, and concerned his sisters would eat his honeybuns, he hid them in his room- a place where food has NEVER been allowed- on the BOTTOM SHELF of his bookcase and then completely forgot about them.
Maggie, on walkabout Tuesday morning to find me (she does this whenever she wakes up from a nap), took the rare detour into Landon's room. Her smooshed non-nose somehow led her to the bookcase where she could smell the sweet deliciousness of the honeybuns through the cardboard and cellophane.
Delighted and probably shocked by her discovery, she somehow carried the box to the livingroom, right to our beautiful new fluffy carpet- the obvious optimal location to settle in and enjoy her bounty.
And then, her cramped mouth with its filed-down teeth somehow tore open the box, tore open the individual cellophane packets, and chewed up the honeybuns, evenly distributing bits of paper mache and sugar throughout the carpet to enjoy later.
While Maggie was in raptures over her new foraging skills, James was coaching lessons and I was on calls and we had no idea our dog who sleeps 22 hours a day and has never chewed anything besides her kibbles was up to anything mischievious.
Later, while Maggie enjoyed a sugar coma sprinkled generously with sugar farts, James walked across the carpet, only to cry out in horror as his feet crunched on invisible sticky sugar spikes.
One thing you have to understand is that James LOVES the new carpet. It is his very favorite thing in our house- he won't let anyone walk on it with shoes and he does his stretches on it for an hour every single night. He also a bit OCD about particular things in the house and that carpet is one of them. To say he was displeased would be a vast and enormous understatement.
While Maggie snored on, oblivious to his bellows from two feet away, James called our friend to send the girls home- assuming they were the culprits. I was still on my calls in the bedroom, hearing the intermittent bellowing and mentions of honeybuns, but assumed nothing was on fire and just muted my line whenever he got particularly loud.
Snores and Sugar Farts
Luckily for them, the girls were innocent and cheerfully skipped back to our friend's house, likely delighted at the displeasure in store for Landon when he got home.
But Landon had football practice and then a football game and then a ride home and THEN James finally got to pounce, "
DID YOU BUY HONEYBUNS AND LEAVE THEM IN YOUR ROOM?!!"
[Shocked innocent face that slowly morphs into a face that remembers securing honeybuns on the floor of his room.]
The crime scene had remained secured so Landon could gaze upon the wreckage, and after consulting google and inventoring our home cleaning products, he got down to work extracting sugar and paper from a once-very fluffy ivory colored carpet.
It's pretty much back to normal, though when he stretches James insists he can still smell the honeybuns.
For her part, Maggie remains amazed she ever found such a treasure and can frequently be fround trotting through Landon's room looking for more, or licking gently at the living room carpet, wondering where it all went.
I told her yesterday there would absolutely be no more honeybuns and the side eye she gave me let me know she heard me in her heart.
And so endeth the great honeybun incident of 2021.
I'd say Maggie will never forget them except she probably already has.
