Snow Dogs

I feel pretty confident that collie owners will tell you with very little exception that their dogs all love the snow.  Big fluffy coats, dogs bred to be working herds in all kinds of weather - makes sense right?  It's just one more thing about this breed that makes me love them because so do I.  I just love winter.

Now granted, as an adult winter is less romantic than it was when I was growing up and formed that opinion.  Now there's contending with shoveling, de-icing, driving on slick streets (trust me, Pittsburgh is not uniformly maintained in that regard - there are areas within this city that I think snowplows never go).  But, still, there's just something about standing outside in the quiet morning with snow falling all around you that is nothing less than magical.  And there is nothing quite as much fun as sledding down a hill with the dogs chasing happily all around you.  So, I want my family to share my love of snow.  Rooney certainly does. 

Geddy less so, but then again, he's not all collie, and he's game enough to romp around as long as he has a companion.  But I worried that I had an exception to the collie rule a few weeks ago when some snow teased us and fell briefly on a Sunday afternoon.  We saw it from the window and rushed Baby H and Sirius outside to experience their first snow.  Baby H was thrilled (probably because his mother and I were and he fed off that, I confess to realize) - he held out his hand to feel the soft, wet flakes fall on it and laughed.  Sirius found that wet stuff catching at his coat no laughing matter.  He immediately wanted back inside, which you'd have to know him to know exactly how extraordinary that was.  As a matter of fact. his first snow encounter was so brief that no photographic evidence exists.  And I was faced with the possibility that I had the only collie in existence that doesn't like snow.

But that was just a tease.  The ground was still too warm to allow anything to catch, and then the temperatures trended back up (and that's when we got into barking trouble because we let the dogs take advantage of it), and snow and even winter seemed like a distant memory.

But Mother Nature rewarded our patience and sent us some real snow last week (almost all gone now, but at least we had some for a brief little bit).  I almost couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it falling and beginning to accumulate.  So out go the dogs, and I anxiously awaited the pup's reaction to this second encounter where he'd be confronted with that wet white stuff not only catching in is fur, but dusting at his feet, and a true frost in the air.  And...

...he loved it!  He couldn't get enough of it!  We'd have to bribe him to get him to come in, and then he'd just stand at the back door and whine to be let back out.  And if we ignored him long enough, he'd scratch at it.  No matter the time of day or night actually - and annoyingly.  One night, after a later hockey game, he was so restless I couldn't get him to settle so I could sleep, so I pulled on boots and went out with him and we ran like children in the moonlit snow until I had him sufficiently tired, he reluctantly came in and allowed himself to be taken to bed.  And it's time like those - those brief moments when there's nothing in your head but the joy of the moment that make life sustainable, and I realized how relieved I was that I had another snow dog!

Now if we can just get some snow to stick around for a while....