A Little Golden Book...

After three days of feeling like we were living in a Currier and Ives lithograph, welcome--The Big Thaw!

All that is left of the gorgeous snow that blanketed everything in sight are a few sad little patches of melting ice. The Corgi snowman I built sits in the middle of a large black mud pit, ears tipped forward, muzzle fallen on the ground, and back sagging.

Poor Tex.

After three days of frolicking in the snow, he is completely baffled by its disappearance.

His puzzled expression reminds me of my all-time favorite children's book, Four Puppies.

In this charming Little Golden Book, published in the sixties, author Anne Heathers chronicles the growth of four Collie puppies who spend a year exploring their world with the help of an older and wiser friendly red squirrel. Thanks to Lilian Obligado's beguiling illustrations, I still read this book at least once each year, usually in the winter, when the nasty weather is getting me down.

Look at these precious puppies mourning the loss of the snow, and trying to pat that snowman back together, and you can see why I sympathize with Tex!

Having grown up in a sunny, warm clime--and been stalled most of his life-- Mr Wonderful has had very little experience with snow.

So it was much to his delight that we let him out to play in the knee-deep snow this morning.

After bucking, kicking, rearing, rolling, and then doing it all over again, he decided to dig in and start eating the snow.

This, he did not like.

We tried determinedly to get a close-up of the snow on his whiskers, but with all the head tossing, rearing, bucking and spinning, it was a little difficult.

This was the best we could do.

Tex, on the other hand, has become quite accomplished at posing for the camera.

Here he is dashing through the snow...

Last but not least, the Aussies. We had so much fun watching them tear around this yard this morning that we left them out for over an hour. As time went on, I noticed that both of them were slowing down considerably. Finally, when they got really quiet, I went outside to investigate.

Turns out that Aussie hair, for some reason, attracts snow. In fact it attracts snow so much that each dog's undercarriage was completely covered with snowballs. Here is what Shorty's looked like, when I cornered him near the alfalfa:

"Watch out where the Huskies Go..."

We woke up this morning to something we don't see very often in Northeast Texas: several inches of gorgeous white pristine snow.

In fact, it is still snowing outside, constituting what I would call a heavy snow, at least for our area. The branches of all of our trees are now growing heavy laden, and sagging under the weight of all that beautiful white stuff.

But I digress.

At the crack of dawn, we slipped on our snow boots and took Tex out for his morning constitutional. He flew out the door as usual, intent upon his business, but drew up short when he realized that everything looked decidedly different, and his favorite potty spot, which had been underwater for days, now looked like Lake Placid in 1980, just before the crowds hit.

His first steps on the white stuff were very tentative.

"Cold paws, cold paws, cold paws..."

But before long he was flying around the property...

"Gee, this is fun!"

He did give himself a bit of a headache eating the snow...

But in the end, the weather put a big smile on his face (and on ours :-)

"I love the snow!"

Do you see the tiny photinia plant in this photo, the one submerged in more than a foot of water?

That tiny photinia marks the spot where we have been teaching Tex to potty.

Have you ever seen a Corgi with five-inch legs try to potty in more than a foot of water?

The only parts of his body that are not submerged are nose, eyes, and ears.

Crocodile Corgi.

To say that our record rainfall is interfering greatly with Tex's potty training would be a gross understatement.

Waterlogged.

That's what we are.