A Ray Of Sunny Shine

My Aunt Bruna looked at our backyard fence with an expression that revealed both amusement and confusion.

“Why,” she asked with a smirk, “is there chicken wire atop the fence? You haven't become farmers have you?”

We were not raising chickens, or any other birds for that matter. Nonetheless our wooden backyard fence, which was already 5 and one half feet high, was indeed topped by a further foot and a half of metal fencing. This gleaming metal embellishment gave the rear of our house the look and feel of a prison courtyard.

“Because of her,” my dad answered, pointing toward the back of the yard.

There, laying stretched in the shade of a cherry tree, was a small yellow dog. The dog was no more that 50 centimetres long from nose to tip of tail, and stood maybe half that. She was a strange mix of Chihuahua and Terrier, and had been rescued from a shelter in Surrey several years earlier when she was only slightly bigger than a tennis ball. The chicken wire, if you can believe it, had been put up to keep her from jumping over the fence, but even this desperate strategy proved useless. Sunny had quickly learned how to pull the metal fencing down with her paws and kick herself over. Using this strategy this dog, who was shorter that a rubber boot, was able to escape over a fence more than five times her height.

Escape, perhaps, is the wrong word to use. She never went very far. Her explorations were always limited to our immediate neighbourhood, and she always came back before dinner. Sometimes she would return covered in dirt, or dust, but normally she would slip into the house and simply pretend she had never been gone. It was because of this wandering spirit that she was known to all the neighbours on the block.

“Saw Sunny yesterday!” Mr. Cowan would often call to me as I returned from school. “Sunny sat with me on the porch this morning,” Mrs. Timms would cheerfully tell me as I delivered my papers. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew and loved Sunny. Everyone that is except for Mr. Chan. Mr. Chan was a nice enough man, but he hated dogs, and because he hated dogs, Sunny loved him.

“Ric! Ric” he would yell, “Ric! Sunny is killing me!”

This would happen every couple of months, and would usually mean that Sunny had found Mr. Chan working in his yard and had gone over to play. My dad would run over to find Mr. Chan backed up against a wall, holding the miniscule Sunny at bay with a shovel. Sunny, thinking this a marvelous and imaginative game, would jump side to side, barking and wagging her tail furiously.

“Thank goodness!” Mr. Chan would yell after Sunny had been scooped up by my father. My dad would always apologize profusely, to which Mr. Chan would normally chuckle a relieved, “Ok.. Ok... No problem...”

No problem. Well, not quite. Sunny was my dog. She slept in my bed most nights, sat with me while I did homework, and went pretty much wherever I went. I loved her and she loved me. But for some reason she hated my pants. I'm not sure why this was. But she did. I never had a pair of jeans that lasted more than a couple of months. Sometimes, when I would go out to mow the lawn, I would find a pair of my pants under a bush, or behind the tool shed. Sometimes I would find only a pocket, or a belt loop, the rest of the crime remaining a mystery. Some dogs have a thing for shoes, or slippers. For Sunny, it was just my pants. Her most obvious attacks on my leg-wear would take place in the afternoon, just after 3 o'clock. Whenever I would return from school, she would be waiting on the front lawn for me to appear. When she got her first glimpse of me as I turned the corner onto our street, she would launch herself along the roadway with all the speed of a missile. The first I would see of her was a distant yellow streak. Then, seconds later, I would hear the metallic clinking of her collar as it was jostled about her neck.

I would have only seconds to prepare before she lunged with deadly precision at my pant leg. Her tiny but determined jaws would hold the loose denim off my jeans in an unbreakable grip.

“Hurrgggggharaghhhghhhhh!” She would growl at my pants.

“Come on Sunny,” I would then say, “let's go,” and I would would drag her the rest of the way home. Maybe she thought it was the pants that made me go to school everyday. I don't know. But she sure hated those pants.

Today my jeans last a lot longer. They don't go missing from my room, or turn up in mysterious pieces in the yard. When I walk home in the afternoons now there is no yellow streak, and no metal clink. And that's too bad.