E-M-M-A

It's time to share another sketch of one of the local cast of characters. In many ways, E-M-M-A, as we must say Emma's name to keep Oz from going crazy with desire, is the pivot point of the neighborhood—the spark plug, the reason there are teeming stories.

You see, we didn't used to W up the little area where Em lives. It is a nice enough street, but it doesn't link up with anything, so we'd have to W up, turn around, and come back. Ho-hum.

Once in a while, though, when we weren't doing a long adventure W, we would go up there. Always nice lawns, always friendly nods from people, but otherwise, nothing…until the day a meat loaf sprinted out of a closed door and came to see us.

It wasn't a meat loaf, of course, but that's about how big Emma was then, about 10 months ago. Her humans had just gotten her, and she was nothing but enthusiasm at that point. Julie was inside on the phone, and had left the door open a crack.
That's all it took. Emma saw us walking down the street on the other side, nosed the door open, and shot across at us. She never flinched, but flew in a straight sprint, leaping on Oz and tumbling around.

Oz is friendly at all times, so the immediate response was a friendly, rolling tumble. They licked, they wrestled, they rolled…it was fun for everyone. Oz would sometimes pat Emma with a paw, sending her pillbug rolling. Em loved it. We had a great time, tempered only slightly by Julie's concern when she finally realized Em was gone and came looking. She apologized up and down, but we were happy. Oz had a friend.
And Em has stayed a friend, though a complex friend. She's a smart dog who loves Ozma an insane amount, but she's also an stubborn and tricky dog. This, then, is E-M-M-A:
I call her a licking rocket, because she runs like the wind and tackles Oz, then won't stop licking until forced to do so.

Her hearing is sharp. She recognizes Oz's collar tag jingle when we're a block away and runs away from home to greet us.

She's inquisitive. Oz sticks her snout in the storm run off pipes to see what's in there. E-M-M-A crawls through them, a hamster in a paper towel.

She's flat out willful. Once when I kept her from biting Oz on the snout, she jumped and kicked me in the chest with her front paws.

She's smart. I gave another dog a dog treat yesterday. Emma didn't see me, but she smelled the dog's breath—and came directly to me. There was no other place the treats could have come from, therefore…

She's a biter. She loves to clamp down on other dogs' snouts and just hang on. However, she knows not everyone likes this, so she'll try to manage it. She'll bite on something else, anything else, to keep from biting snouts. I've seen her clamp down on a weed to be polite. More on E soon.

Greg