A Porter Tale

My wife is making me blog about our dog. She says I can't go to sleep until I tell a story about him. So here I am with my Corona in hand to do my duty.

So there we are. It's Sunday afternoon. All is pleasant. All is peaceful. All is serene. As we gaze down upon the wide world of Sunday serenity, there's a particularly quiet block of residential homes that occupy the south hill of a smallish town called Potlatch. And along that very block runs a street called Spruce that humbly stretches a short distance a top that southern hill. And if one wanted, one might take a stroll down such a street and pass the goodly neighbors of Goudimel Parish. There's Magnus, Lucy's lion, chewing on the bloody remains of a deer, Mr. Jones is out on his hands and knees talking to his front lawn, trying to convince it to be happy and green, and then there's my house, a small white dwelling built in the 1920s.

So there we are. It's Sunday afternoon. And the Sumpter home is pleasant and peaceful and serene. Then there is a loud bang that echoes through that quiet block of residential homes. What is that loud bang? It is not the sound of the Atwood boys blowing up a small lizard. Nor is it the sound of Nathaniel Rosendahl running his bike into a tree, and no, it is not the sound of Eric Jones drifting asleep and falling off his chair during family reading. No, it is the sound of Porter, our puppy, helping himself to a two layer cake, cooling on the kitchen counter. Sadly, the story doesn't end there. The poor puppy proceeded to pack his little belly with every crump of cake. The little 14lb puppy had a beer-belly to make me jealous. Of course that's not saying much, but believe me, it was big. And my wife says he looked like Templeton from Charlotte's Web. Needless to say, the dog got sick.

The End