Milo’s Play Toys

Even though we live on a gravel road in the country, I still worry sometimes about what people think as they drive by. There’s the old cedar post fence we’ve been dismantling over the past couple of years, which is turning into a nice jumble of honeysuckle, mugwort and bittersweet, and the big pile of firewood dumped in a snaky line by the drive (we ordered double this fall after a mid-blizzard delivery of green wood last season).

And then there’s Milo’s play toys.

A Jack Russell terrier who came to us from a scrabble city lot 10 years ago with a plastic neck cone and a cast on his back leg, he rules his domain here in the hollow. If karma has any meaning, he is the reincarnation of someone who deserved a really, really good life on the next plateau.

He needs no store bought toys – a plastic cone filled with peanut butter, squeaky fluff balls or other such degenerate stuff. An empty plastic soda bottle (green Seagram’s ginger ale preferred) or  red coffee jug does him just fine and he’s a delight to see scampering about, piercing them with his teeth, tossing them in the air and turning on a dime to re-attack. I think Milo is God’s play toy.

It’s all recycling to me, but might look like trash to someone passing.

We can look and yet not understand what we see. But when I see Milo I know I’m looking at sheer perfection.