Before we even took one step on our walk this night, she observed our shadow, dancing on the barn building behind us, and she immediately began enthusiastically barking. I was confused at first about her outburst. Since we got her as a puppy from the pound in Bay City, I hadn’t heard her bark at anything, much. Since then I discovered that she barked at vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, brooms, and even my wife brushing her hair. Of course, she barks at other dogs – but that’s a story for another time.
When she starting barking in the twilight of the day, my first thought was that someone was coming. I looked for some intruder, but found no one. Then I saw the direction of her ire was aimed at the barn wall behind the house. The light from the house shown on the barn wall and our shadow played wonderfully black upon barn wall. When I discovered at what she was barking, I laughed out loud.
Then as we took our walk in the twilight of the day, I pondered what that might mean. And it seems to me, that we do a lot of barking at shadows in our own way. Anything we don’t understand, anything that is out of our comfort zone, anything that is different from how we do things, manages to get our ire.
