Long Lonesome Road

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and a perfect day for a three-hour drive to Rossman Apiaries in Moultrie, Georgia to pick up bee keeping equipment. I never thought that I could leave from Point A in Georgia, drive three hours and still be in Georgia! Florida or Alabama maybe but Georgia? Still? None of the dogs came along for the ride in my old single cab pick-up truck.

I pondered the meaning behind some of the town names like Ty Ty or Sylvester and laughed as I passed a road sign for Long Lonesome Road. I gave up on the GPS hours before as it kept directing me down improbable roads and relied on the Google Maps directions which also proved unreliable when I reached my destination miles before the directions told me and on the opposite side of the road.

The truck tires crunched on the hot gravel stones that made up the driveway. The school next door had just let out for the day and the sounds of laughing children drifted toward the warehouse. I was greeted by a small black dog with mottled white “socks” for paws. She had no collar but clearly owned the place. As I approached the entrance to the warehouse and obeyed the large stop sign that instructed customers to wait for their orders, the small dog coaxed me into petting her head. She looked to be a cross between a pit bull and something else. As I stared at her mottled white feet she looked an awful lot like the timid Australian Sheppard lounging in the shade of another building on the property. She rolled onto her side, exposing her belly and I patted it. Puffs of dusty gravel rose from her skin with each pat and I thought that the dog spent a large amount of time rolling in the dirt driveway. I decided to call her Pig Pen.

The waiting area of the warehouse was too hot and I retreated to my truck, leaving the passenger door open and leaning against the seat. Pig Pen trotted over and placed her front paws on the running board to get a good look inside. She demanded a few more pats before she crawled under the truck for shade. She didn’t stay there very long. A Monarch butterfly hopped from one piece of gravel to another within view of the dog. Pig Pen popped from the shade and into the sun following the path of the butterfly which seemed oblivious to her nose. Finally, my order was ready and loaded into the back of the truck. As I drove away, I could see Pig Pen sitting in the entryway to the warehouse watching me go. When I reached home three hours later, my four dogs felt that I had been gone for a lifetime and they didn’t even care that I carried the smell of a small black dog from Moultrie, Georgia.