One of my favorite things about visiting at home on weekdays, when I have the whole house to myself, is not having the whole house to myself.
I get to share with Maggie.
She likes to squeeze into the cube of space under my desk right where my feet are supposed to go so I have to lean way forward to reach the keyboard. I prop my feet up on her back and scratch with my toes. Sometimes we get in bed and spoon.
A while ago, Maggie stopped climbing stairs inside the house. She’s about eight years old, but she’s very active, her vet confirms that she’s in good health, and she gallops up the deck stairs from the backyard without a second thought (especially if you’re holding a treat at the back door.)
Maggie has been an upstairs-and-downstairs dog for most of her life. After years of very moderately good behavior, stubborn persistence and ignoring the rules, she earned the privilege of sleeping on her own bed on my parent’s bedroom floor.
At night, she turns in with my mom. She sleeps in the nude (you know, collarless) so her tags don’t jingle in the middle of the night. In the morning, my dad goes downstairs and Maggie trots out to get the newspaper with him. When he brings coffee up to my mom, Maggie scrambles up, too, and gets in the bed. She attends while my mom gets ready for work and then she sees her off (and gets a treat on the way out the door) and retires to the people bed for an almost all-day nap until my brother comes home from school and they romp a little.
She mastered the tip-toe, but if I listened closely, I could hear her paws on the hardwood floors and know that she was making the rounds to secure the premises and taking her post. The best sound in the house is Maggie clattering down to greet you when she hears the back door slide open.
So you can see how her sudden refusal to alight stairs was a serious hit to her upstairs-and-downstairs life. She became an and-downstairs dog.
She wasn’t happy about it. She cried at the foot of the stairs at night. She barked if someone seemed to be ‘hanging out’ on the second floor unnecessarily -“can’t you do your ‘hanging out’ down here?” When we encouraged her to come up, she would put one or two front paws on the first step and howl a few times, give us a pointed look that said, “I would if I could, but you know I just can’t do that,” and hunker down like a speed bump against the flat of the first stair, slumped in body and in spirit.
When Maggie’s spirits slumped, mine did, too. Visiting home wasn’t as cozy. I kept thinking I heard her tip-toe and I would listen for the clatter. I hated going to bed knowing that she wasn’t safe and sound, tucked in upstairs with the family. She moped at the foot of the stairs and we were all a little mopey without the click clack of her paws coming up and down the stairs to greet us, morning, noon and night.
We tried coaxing, prodding and tempting. We tried leading her by the collar. We tried ignoring her. My brother even hefted her up the stairs once, her paws rotating like a boat-propeller once she realized what was going on. She snuggled down and he said, “I don’t get it, she loves being up here.” My mom and I even wrote to a pet psychic.
Finally, my dad bought a roll of that grabby foam shelf-liner for dishes in cabinets and my mom lay out a strip on every step. It still takes coaxing, but now she has a little more traction and a little more confidence. She paces back and forth in front of the stairs, testing her paws on the first step a billion times like it’s a ritual before she gathers her courage and goes up.
This morning I woke up with the sun in my eyes, rolled over, smiled, and called for Maggie. I heard her at the bottom of the stairs, but she didn’t come up. I called a few times, I even fake-whistled because sometimes that gets her excited, but I just heard her prancing around to the hesitation blues. I got out of bed and went to look down and try to talk her into it and she was looking at me like, “No seriously, I totally would if I could, but look, I just can’t!”
The puppy-gate was up.
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