The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

A thunderstorm moved over our house at 3:00 am. It hung around for several hours, knocked out our electricity for a couple minutes and dumped a huge amount of rain in the neighborhood.

As I lay in bed listening to the hum of falling rain and steady rumble of thunder another noise reached my ears, a hollow-sounding bang. One daughter was spending the night with a friend and the other daughter was staying at her aunt's. It could have been disconcerting. But it wasn't. I knew it was the dog.

Our retriever, Chessie, has decided, in her dotage, to be afraid of thunderstorms. She never was during the first 13 years of her life, but this summer she is. She runs up and down the hall and tries to scratch her way through our bedroom door.

Last night she followed this up by going into the hall bathroom and somehow closing the door behind her. Finding herself locked in a small room, she did what any senile dog would do — she left a pile on the floor, opened both under-sink cabinet doors and attempted to raise the lid on the toilet. It was this last that was causing the banging noise. I let her out, cleaned her mess and closed the door so she couldn't repeat her performance.

If this was the first time this had happened, I would think it was probably an accident. But last night was the third time she's done it in the past month.

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