Digging a Hole
The shovel crunched through the hard packed sandy soil. It had been near drought all summer. Cathy tossed the dirt aside on the pile that she’d accumulated next to the hole. Silly wasn’t a big dog, at least it didn’t seem so while she was alive. Cathy felt stupid crying over a mongrel that she’d not even known but a few weeks. The dog just showed up on the back porch steps one morning. It was thin and wiry, black, without a speck of white anywhere. Cathy gave her some left over scrambled eggs and filled a bucket with water. She named her Silly because the dog was just that, silly. Her rear end wiggled constantly and she would bark at Cathy when she came outside to hang the clothes or put out the trash as if to say, “Stop that work and play with me.” Cathy was seventy-five years old, to damn old to be out in the back yard playing with a dog, but she’d throw a stick and Silly would run like hell and bring it back to her, then sit there wagging that tail, begging to do it again. Cathy was