Starlight Stroll.

Remember a few posts back I mentioned that I have been walking the dog -good old Sammy -as part of my exercise regime in coordination with my diet plan?

Well, normally I only walk him during the daylight hours. If I take him out after dark, I usually just have him on the leash and stay on the front stoop, letting him run about a bit in the front yard. It's not the most effective method much of the time -other than he will empty his bladder then but he seems to like and need to walk a good bit -or I should say, run or trot -before making any deposits of other matter.

My reason for not wanting to walk him along our road after dark are that it is, A) dark, very dark here and B) sometimes there are other animals around that I'm not all that keen on possibly encountering then either.

Well tonight, I decided since I didn't get a full walk in with him earlier today that I would get brave and take him for a stroll along our road.

Under normal circumstances, our road is, as I said above, dark -very dark. There are two street lights along our road. One is two houses down from our place and the other, well it's about seven houses up the street and around a curve too so it doesn't give much light down this way.

The nice thing about my walk tonight with Sammy though was some of our neighbors still have their Christmas lights up and burning. So, even though it was after 10 p.m. when I was out with him, there was a good bit of light shining down on the street enabling me to see fairly well -for most of our walk anyway.

One thing I noticed though -and this made me wish I'd brought my camera with me, although I don't know how well a picture would have turned out of this -is our neighbor about three doors up from us has a small picture window in the front of her house and she has her tree placed in front of that window, all light up with multi-color lights. Looks really pretty just with that. But what really caught my eye there was that on her wall, across from the picture window, she has a mirror hanging and the tree lights then of course were visible not just in the window, but kind of with a 3-D effect as you could see them in the mirror too. Really pretty, it was.

As we proceeded up the street, I saw that two houses up along the old railroad track, above and behind the houses on our street, have street lights by two of the houses there. And the light from those lights was streaming down alongside some of the homes along our road. Shining on the snow on the ground, crisp, crunchy snow that glistened in that light along with the little bit of light the stars shining provided, made for a very pretty stroll -albeit a pretty nippy one.

We made it up to the woods area along our street and I decided to turn around there and head back home.

As we got close to the curve in the road, Sammy suddenly went very tense. Stopped dead in his tracks, straining at the leash and growling. Then he began pulling me towards the opposite side of the road too and I was trying to reign him in a bit when I realized I saw some movement along the roadside too.

Kind of put my heart in my mouth right about then, that did!

As he strained harder and harder and growled all that much louder, I realized the form I saw was moving and finally it came to a point where some of these street lights and people's porch lights allowed me to figure out what was there besides just Sammy and me!

It was a man walking a very big -and I do mean, VERY BIG, dog! This dog looked to be about at least 6-8 times the size of our little Sammy and yet, here was this simple minded mutt of ours acting like he is king of the mountain, all ferocious and such with his bravado.

I guided Sammy past the other dog and we made our way home with no other "sightings."

After Mandy got home, I asked her if she knows anyone -a guy with a big dog who might be out late at night walking his dog too. She laughed as she told me that would be the husband of a good friend of hers who live over on the hill behind our house.

So, next time -if indeed there is a "next time" -that I am out walking Sir Samuel J. Muttley after dark and I encounter some guy walking this great big dog -(it's an Akita I think)- at least I will know who it is and can surprise him by saying, "Top of the evening to you, Jerry!"