Catching Up

No matter how young you are in your mind, age has a way of catching up, tapping you on the shoulder and saying, "Unh, unh, unh."  Bessie, in people years, is even older than I, and we've run into a bit of a situation.  Both of us are creatures of habit and we're set in our ways.  The morning routine goes like this:  while the coffee machine does its thing, I put food in the kids' dishes and give Bess her first treat (she gets three).  Coffee in hand, we all four wander back to the bedroom where the computer has been warming up, or whatever it is that computers do.  Bess goes to the outside bedroom door, asking to go out for a potty run.  I turn on the porch light and let her out.  So far, so good.  Normally, when she's done, she yips at the door, I open it, she comes in and I boost her up on the bed.  This last week, however, she yips, but it's not at the door.  There are two steps up to the deck, on probably eight-to-ten-inch risers, and her poor old legs can't make the jump anymore.  I completely understand because I have trouble with stairs, too, and even with the porch light, I'm not going out in the dark to lift her up.  Our compromise is for me to go back through the house to open the front door for my girl.

It's taken a few days for her to get with the program.  The problem is that Bess is almost completely deaf and doesn't hear if I call her.  We communicate mostly by hand signals and those don't work well in the dark.  I finally figured out that if I turn off the deck light and turn on the front porch light, she'll come around to that door, and our day can go on as usual.  Where there's a will, there's a way.