The dog, the squirrels and the ghost

Last week I was visiting my parents at their bed and breakfast in Vermont. I came down one morning and smelled something cooking on the stove. It’s not unusual to come downstairs in the morning at the B and B and find something amazing being made for the guests, caramel banana French toast, apple cheddar quiche, cheese strata, but my mom told me “Oh, this is the dog’s breakfast” and then opened the refrigerator to show me the dogs meals for the week which she had prepared. Chicken, rice, ground beef, pulled beef, and what looked like a very expensive leg of lamb in a red wine reduction sauce. (Okay I made that one up). Then she looked at the dog and asked him which one he would prefer to have for breakfast. She waited a few seconds for the dog to respond (he didn’t.) and then my father declared he wanted the warm ground beef and she dumped it in his bowl, adding a little of the pulled beef on top and whispering, just so the dog could hear, “I added a little pulled beef for you just in case that’s what you wanted.” Meanwhile I sat at the table and ate cold cereal with soymilk and was denied a second cup of coffee. Two years ago, my parents got this West Highland Terrier that they named Sir Francis MacDuff, affectionately nicknamed Mac. It didn’t take long for Mac to be the center of attention around the inn. Despite my parents being home all day, Mac gets sent off every other day to doggie day care, just so he can play with his friends. Every time my dad goes to the store, he comes home with a new toy for Mac. My father recently ordered him a dog-sized kilt imported from Scotland, which he wears proudly to reflect his heritage.

But despite the lavish breakfasts and imported gifts, my mother has a complex relationship with the dog. He doesn’t love her the way he loves my dad, his pack leader. And while he lets her pick him up and cuddle with him, he doesn’t give a lot back in terms of affection. There’s no excitement when she walks into a room the way he lights up, wags his tail, bounces on his hind legs and collapses on the floor for belly rubs like when he sees my dad. The week I was home, my father bought a king sized bed. For thirty years my parents have slept in the same queen sized poster bed, but ever since the dog came around and started nuzzling his way in the middle and sleeping upside down with his little paws in the air, stretching his body as long as it could go, they felt a little cramped. So my father finally caved and bought a king sized bed to replace their thirty year old poster bed. My mother was not happy about this change, after all, it made more sense to her that instead of adjusting the bed, why not make the dog sleep on the floor like, well, a dog. And there are squirrels in the walls of the inn. At night, the squirrels run back and forth through my parents’ bedroom walls and the dog chases them on the outside of the wall, giving his little woof and padding back and forth around the room, keeping my parents up at night. Despite his months spent in obedience school, nothing seemed to stick, most of the time Mac does whatever he wants and at night what he wants to do is bark at the squirrels in the wall.

Meanwhile, I was having trouble sleeping of my own on the other side of the house. My room is haunted. The inn is a 150 year old Victorian mansion and for some reason my room is the one the 150 year old Victorian ghost has decided to frequent. I’m not a huge believer in the spirit world or anything, but I can say with at least 90 percent certainty that there is some type of paranormal activity going on in that region of the house. The cat refuses to go in there for more than two minutes, I once woke up in the middle of the night to find that I was completely unable to see anything, despite the bright moon outside that illuminated the rest of the rooms in the house, and plus, my neighbor told me that an unidentified translucent man with a walker once chased her down the stairs from my room. It’s just something I feel pretty sure about. So while my mother and father were in their room trying to get Mac to stop chasing the squirrels in the walls, I was in my room trying to fall asleep with Netflix on to drown out any clanging of ghostly chains or at least to think about the Lions next victory on Friday Night Lights instead of the angry old man spirit fingers slowly opening the closet door on the opposite side of my room.

“I am the one who feeds him ground beef every morning, and he doesn’t even like me,” my mom complained one day. “Even the dog is a Huber,” she says, using our surname like an adjective. She doesn’t have to explain what she means by this. To her, the word “Huber” represents the qualities all three of her kids and her husband have that she doesn’t share, what she refers to as our “German heritage”: our lack of need for very much physical affection (The Hubers are not huggers), our interiority and tendency not to communicate feelings, our independence and refusal to accept help unless we really, really, really need it. All three of the kids have it and she’s right, somehow my father picked out a dog just like us. My mother always tells me she had no idea any of us would turn out the way we did. “I had this idea of what my kids would be like,” she told me, “but it was nothing like the way you turned out. Sometimes I don’t feel like you’re even my kids, I look at you and think 'who are these people?'” Because of the Huber in me, I don’t take this too personally, but I do wonder what it would be like to give birth to children who turned out nothing like you. I imagine my own life in the future if I gave birth to a bunch of kids who wanted to play a lot of organized sports and loved math. I would feel pretty left out when they broke out the soccer ball or the quadratic equations. And I guess that’s how my mom feels, she kept hoping we’d all turn out differently, that I’d one day want to wear all the Lily Pulitzer-type dresses she kept buying me as a kid, or that the dog would look up and realize she was the one providing him with the freshly cooked ground beef and lather her face with kisses. It just never happened that way.

But my mom isn’t totally right. While I’m there, we go to the fabric store and spend hours looking at prints and talking about sewing projects. We go to the Shelbourne Museum and pore over all the antique medicine bottles in the recreated old fashioned apothecary. We get Vietnamese food twice in one week and both ask for no noodles in our dish, we want to cut back on carbs, but when the waitress bring out dishes with noodles, we shrug, cover them in Sriacha and eat them all anyway. And we share one major thing in common: I’m kind of fed up with the dog, too. He’s more of a Huber than I am, and I’d like to get a little lick on the cheek every once and awhile.

Around three am one night, my dad cracked my door open and I saw him usher Mac into my room. He closed the door behind him and Mac jumped up on the bed with me and curled into a little ball against my leg, unconcerned with spirits, and apparently happy to be banished from the room with the squirrels, relived of his nighttime duties as squirrel watcher. And finally with him there, I switched off the computer, felt his hot breath against my leg, and fell asleep. Everyone was finally at peace, even the ghost, it seemed. Maybe we all need a little more help than we let on.