Boom Boom

We spent a lot of time this spring removing the old overgrown and dilapidated fence on the back of our property. I chopped and hacked the Blackberry, Salmon Berry, Morning Glory and Honeysuckle back several feet past the property line to get room to put up a new fence.

Every now and then, buried deep in the brambles, I'd come across the remains of an old tennis ball, the fuzzy green skin almost all gone, the white rubber insides showing through like bleached bone. I picked them up and saved them, putting them in a row on a shelf in the woodshed, not knowing why.

I remembered how Boom Boom used to retrieve those tennis balls, catching them in the air on the first bounce, and strutting his way back to lay it at your feet for another go. My shoulder got so sore from throwing tennis balls I eventually had to get a tennis racquet to keep the game going. Every now and then one of the grandkids or I would hit one a little too hard and knock it over the fence into the bushes. Boomer would run to the fence and go on point to show us where the ball was. Some times we could reach through the thorns, grab it and resume the game but once in a while there was no way to get to it, so we'd go get a new ball. Boom Boom wouldn't have anything to do with it. He'd stay on point, whining, as if to say, “It's right there, I can smell it!” Sometimes he wouldn't accept a new ball until the next day.

Yesterday, while I was getting a wheel barrow out of the wood shed I looked at the row of ruined tennis balls and realized why I'd saved them. I dug a hole next to Boom Booms grave and returned his lost treasures.