[Dailydrool] Snow people

[Elizabeth]

None of our bassets ever paid any attention to snow sculptures. But one of the houses Ken and I used to walk past when we lived in East Nashville had an ancient pair of cement foo dogs/guardian lion dogs on either side of its front walk. 

The first time we walked our Elsinore and young Charlie past those, Elsinore paid them no mind, but Charlie stopped a safe distance away to study them. Then he cautiously got a little closer, stopped, sniffed in their direction, and sniffed some more. Finally, ignoring our laughter, he screwed up the courage to get close enough to touch one of them with his nose. It didn’t react even when he tried more invasive sniffing. Giving on not getting any reaction from it, he looked up at me, sort of shrugged his shoulders, and moved on. 

The next time we walked past the foo dogs, he slowed down but then remembered they weren’t anything to worry about and trotted right past them. From then on, he followed Elsinore’s lead and ignored them entirely.

Back in the 1970s, my family went to San Francisco for a weekend, a visit that included a stop at the Japanese Tea Gardens. My little sister was about four years old at the time and had pretty much the same initial reaction to a pair of large foo dogs there as Charlie’d had, only without the information-gathering sniffing. We couldn’t convince her they weren’t real, even when her big sister (me) went over and patted one. She refused to go anywhere near them. She’s never had any fear of snow people, though, so there is that.

Elizabeth