Another Run at a Beginning

I stared into the corner where I placed my stick this morning, but it was empty. There was only one person that could have taken it, and that person was my big brother David. How could he leave his sister defenseless? How was I going to make it home now? I had two options. I could retrace my steps for a half a block and then walk around the whole block, which would take an extra fifteen minutes, or I could hope to sneak past the nemesis of the neighborhood.
Our neighbor's dog was the cause for my apprehension. And believe you me, I had reason to be nervous around her. She reminded me of a miniature wolf. She was, I suppose, a medium-sized dog with a grayish-brown coat and a white belly. Her tail was fluffy and long. But despite her unthreatening size, she was the most menacing thing in my world. Ironically her name was Cuddles.

David and I had to deal with her on a daily basis because we had to cross her path on the way to school. That’s why we started carrying sticks; large, heavy ones. If Cuddles saw the stick, she would bark at us, but she’d stay in her owner’s yard.

The neighbors were civil people; however, they couldn’t, wouldn’t believe that their little Cuddles was a mean dog. The problem was that they were usually at work when we went to school. Even after my mother explained how terrified we were of the dog and asked them to watch it more carefully, they said that we must be harassing the dog or it wouldn’t bother us. It took my dad going over and threatening to call the police, for them to keep Cuddles tied up or in the house.

That eased the situation considerably, but there were times that the Rasmussens forgot or Cuddles wiggled her way off the chain. Walking to and from school, I was always filled with apprehension until we had gotten past the Rasmussen's house and had stowed our sticks for our next foray. David was much braver than I was, still if Cuddles saw any one of us, and wasn’t tied up, she was more than eager to gnash her teeth and tear after us.

We devised a system so that we would always have a stick to protect ourselves. There were only two places that we kept them so that they wouldn’t get lost or taken. The first was by the chimney on the corner of our house. These sticks were for business and we never played with them so they were always there when they were needed. The other place was in the corner of Mr. Harston's steer pasture near the end of the street. We each had our own stick and we weren’t supposed to use each other’s. Now my stick wasn't where it should have been. I remembered that David hadn't gone to school this way this morning. He had walked over to Jonathan's house to help him carry something for Show and Tell. I had figured that he would help his friend take his stuff home too so I hadn't thought to carry his stick with me on my way to school. Now I was stuck.