Our Evening Ritual

We live a couple of miles outside of town down a winding gravel road and up on a hardwood-covered ridge. There's almost no traffic since we're on a gravel road. The county keeps threatening to pave it but I really hope they don't. We only have one neighbor. They are a really sweet older couple and they live on the ridge on the other side of the road. We can barely even see their house from ours. Our land is surrounded by more undeveloped land covered in even more trees...I'm terrible at guessing acreage but I'm going to say 20-ish. There's also a really beautiful meadow that's currently covered in goldenrod and black-eyed susans and some really pretty purple flowers that I can't identify.

Here's a few pics of what I'm talking about. I'm bummed that none of my pics of the flowers turned out. It was really humid and my camera lens fogged up.




Our favorite thing to do in the evenings is take the dogs for a run. Now, before you get all excited thinking that Wes and I are exercising, I should tell you that we ride the four-wheeler while the dogs run. I'm pretty sure The Dog Whisperer wouldn't approve of our method! Wes has clocked Maddie, the German Shepherd, at about 25 mph. She runs like the wind! So graceful...like a race horse. Dazey, the Golden Retriever, not so much. She's fast too but she runs like an elephant, a really clumsy elephant.

Here are the girls:





One thing you should know about Dazey...she loves water. The muddier the better. She practically lives in the creek behind our house and can't pass up a good mud puddle!




We usually see a lot of rabbits and the girls love to chase them. Don't worry...they wouldn't know what to do if they actually caught one. We have a pet rabbit and Maddie likes to play with him. She's actually really gentle but it scares him to death. Did you know rabbits can scream? Maddie knows how to open the doors and she let herself into the house one day while Max was out. I heard screaming and I thought it was Caitlin. I went running and found Maddie trotting down the hall with a very limp rabbit dangling gently from her massive jaws. I said very calmly, "Maddie, give me the rabbit." and held out my hands and she very gently placed him in them. Then Max really came to life and started scrambling up my arms, across my chest and onto my shoulder. By the way, it's not the girls fault, canine or human, that he's only got one eye. That was a whole other rabbit incident. Max likes to live life on the edge! Boy, did I just get sidetracked or what? Talk about chasing rabbits...!

This particular evening we didn't see rabbits but we did see a huge deer, a doe, according to Wes. She jumped out of the brush just a few feet ahead of us and ran down the trail in front of us for a little bit. That was pretty cool even though we see tons of deer. I always tell Wes, who still gets excited every time there's one in our yard, that it's no more exciting than seeing a stray dog! Anyway, she was moving way to fast for me to get picture. Too bad.

So that's our ritual. The girls love it and we know it's been a good time if their tongues are dragging the ground when we get back home.