Jonah's got NOTHIN' on Blue!

I love Valentines Day. It isn’t that Mr. Big prize has ever gone overboard with demonstrative shows of affection on said day; I just like the whole idea of it. I love that there is a day set aside where we, as a nation, celebrate romance. As a woman, I feel strongly that there should be several of these days every single year, and as a Southern Woman, I feel they all should include jewelry. Sadly, MBP does not understand the concept of jewelry. He doesn’t see the ‘point’; he thinks there is no ‘need’ for it. Well, I can assure you that basketball does not nourish his body but I guarantee his spirit needs it-that is how I feel about jewelry. I very nearly had a heart attack this Christmas when I opened not one, but TWO boxes containing sparklies from one Fletcher Smith Jewelers. Now, mind you, these were not boxes containing sparklies of the four/five figure variety, but I feel we are making progress. But again, I digress.
As a now two dog family we suddenly found ourselves with new and rather nerve wracking challenges with which to deal. While Blue had been a mess even from her earliest minutes there were certain doggy issues which with we’d never had to deal with her. She didn’t ‘get into’ things. If something wasn’t right out in the open for her to destroy it was relatively safe. While carpet, plants and window frames all shook with fear when she advanced on them, things like shoes and trash and underwear went unharmed. You have to actually expel some energy to get at those particular things, and as you may have deduced, Blue avoided expending energy whenever possible. But then came Inky. When not trying to exhaust herself playing ball, Inky was getting into things. As a tiny puppy she’d squeeze through a cracked closet door and nibble away with her tiny needle teeth. Almost immediately upon her entry into our family I lost dozens of pairs of beloved mules and sling-backs. But she was so cute…how could we really hold her responsible? And how can you spank a dog that is so tiny and black that you can’t tell the front from the back unless its’ tongue is sticking out? I mean, really? Can you sense that I have discipline issues with dogs under a certain weight?
And so, because of my seeming inability to discipline this tiny black dog, she continued to get into things well into her adulthood. But the problem with that really didn’t end with her canines. She turned into some kind of small black fuzzy doggy crack pusher. She’d pull things out, Blue would chew them. They made an incredible demolition team. They cooperatively got into and destroyed so many things that our home became permanently infused with ‘odor du bitter apple’. Are you familiar with Bitter Apple? Bitter Apple is a magic spray that supposedly is so offensive to animals that they turn away even from the tastiest morsel. Ha. Not Blue. She LOVED bitter apple. Adored it. If we sprayed it on something, she licked it…and licked it…and licked it. It was absurd. So that was not help whatsoever, and the destruction continued. Inky was like a tiny doggy-crack pusher, telling Blue “Here, try this, just once. Just one little lick of shoe. It won’t hurt. Give it a try.”, and Blue was hooked. So, our personal belongings suffered, greatly.
Our second Valentines Day rolled around, and promised to be much different from our first. I may have mentioned earlier that the first year of our marriage was less than sterling when it came to the condition of our bank account. It was sweet, and romantic, but relatively bare in the gift department. I wrote a fairy tale, starring MBP as Prince Charming, and I received a love letter complete with custom envelope and heart stamp. The second Valentines Day looked a bit brighter in the gifts department for both of us. Strangely, I don’t recall at all what I got for MBP, but I certainly remember what he got for me. Lingerie. It was glorious, feminine, frilly and completely impractical lingerie. I had never received lingerie as a gift before, unless you count the white granny briefs Santa always left in my stocking from childhood until I moved out of my parent’s home. And white granny briefs this was not-this was a fabulously romantic/sexy gift of the variety that a husband gives his wife. It was a lovely top/bottom set, that was only slightly ill-fitting and a fabulous deep blue. I adored it.
Then, the strangest thing happened; the bottom half of the set disappeared, before I’d even had a chance to wear it. I knew exactly where I’d left it in the closet, and it simply wasn’t there. I had put it in the laundry; because I have a strange aversion to wearing things that are that intimate that may have been handled by God knows who before it goes on my person. I know-I’m crazy. But, as I pulled the load of dark clothes from the dryer that I was certain contained my beautiful new lingerie I found only the top. I searched EVERYWHERE for the bottom, literally, and they were simply nowhere to be found. Not a scrap, not a thread, nothing. They had simply vanished, and I was heartbroken. MBP was devastated, but we won’t go into the reasons for that here.
I gave up hope of ever finding any clue as to what happened to my beautiful blue bottoms. One evening a week or so after their mysterious disappearance MBP and I were out on our back deck enjoying the sunset. We were leaning on the railing, looking over our back yard, when my eye caught a bright hint of blue in the grass below. When I looked down I saw the unthinkable; my beautiful lingerie bottoms were at the base of the deck, having obviously passed through the digestive system of one very large animal, and having been deposited as…SCAT. My gorgeous Valentines Day gift was now Blue scat! Upon closer inspection (and we are not going into detail on how that happened, but it included sticks and much stretching) we discovered that they were still in one solid piece. My undies had passed, whole, through the belly of the beast. Even Jonah would not have survived that journey-neither did the undies.