Keeping Little Girls In

My dear sweet grandmother Phyllis whom I love with all my heart (and who we lovingly call Phee) is keeping Polly Browne while we go on our adventure. We are eternally grateful for her willingness to take care of our little girl! Not only does Polly Browne adore Phee, but the fact that we won't have to kennel her for so long while we're gone makes us very happy. We hope Phee will enjoy keeping her, and of course PB will love being there.

A few things have had to be done in order to ensure Polly's safety while she stays with Phee. Namely, she needs to be fenced in! She is not a disobedient dog (on purpose anyway), but she is an incurably curious dog, who will run right into oncoming traffic as she chases a butterfly. She has no sense of fear, caution or limitations. She is also a very fast dog when she's got on her eyes on the prize (another dog of any size or temperament, a person walking by, just about anything or anyone who could possibly be a friend), there is no stopping her. Joey and I have had difficulty catching her before when she behaves in this way, and though Phee is in wonderful shape, we cannot ask her to go chasing Polly down the street in the event that she decides to go embark on a certain death spiral of shame....it doesn't happen often, but it only takes one time, and we cannot put this burden on Phee.

So Joey has built a fence in Phee's backyard, or rather, continued on with the fence that used to be there. A new neighborhood sprouted up about five years ago behind Phee's property, where the golf course used to be. My sister and I would spend hours playing on or near the golfcourse, either trying to resell lost golf balls to their previous owners (a low cost, all profit business model, you might say) or running through the turf in the rain (A very fun activity, but one which made the golfers EXTREMELY angry! They would scream at us from their houses as we ran away. I guess golfers like their grass) or feeding the ducks. But now the golf course is no more. The contractors in their work tore most of Phee's fence down and never put it back up. They built their own large fences for the new houses, but the structures do not go all the way down to the ground and therefore do not provide any type of security for a dog.

Phee recently revealed to me that her fence was originally built to keep another little girl "in".....me! I never knew that before, but I can certainly see why they needed a fence during my tiny days. Like Polly Browne, I didn't have much sense of fear, caution or limitations.


So here we are once again, building a fence to keep a little girl that we love "in!"