Imagining Pants

The latest running joke in the house is that our dog wears pants. I am not sure why it started, and it may have been something suggested by the rabbit, but this is a definite topic of conversation lately. Today, I got a text from my husband that our dog preferred the laundry room to the outside. (I can no longer leave her in the house when no one is home. She gets lonely. She rebels. She poops under the baby grand piano in the living room.) I texted back to my husband that of course she prefers the laundry room, as that is where she washes her pants. Instantly, I could see her in all her full, fuzzy husky glory, slipping out of her red satin pajama bottoms and tossing them into the wash. I just wish she would wash her dog blanket as well.


This Sunday at dinner, my son asked why our dog poops under the piano. I quoted my husband, who was not here at the time.

“Because, it is a magic canopy and it makes her poop disappear,” I said.

“She thinks her poop is invisible,” added my daughter.

My son seemed satisfied with these answers and we moved onto non-fecal dinner conversation. In the meantime, the dog lay at our feet. She was thinking about her pants, I said to the children.

Last night at dinner, my daughter announced the dog’s newest outfit: a purple dress with matching hat. She said our old dog, a Sharpei that still lives out his existence in the home of my former life, once wore a tutu. I had forgotten about this, but he did. Such is the life in an imaginative household. We had even danced with him as he wore my daughter’s tutu.

Mid-morning today, I received a note from my youngest step-daughter. She said she had two pet mice, plastic ones. So I asked the most obvious question: Do they were pants?

And so it goes.