My neighbor’s dog barked all night. Sometimes their other dog would join in. No matter what, the dogs would not stop barking but for a few minutes. Sweet relief would then be interrupted by barking once more.
< – – – >
You start thinking about things when you are constantly being woken up by a barking dog. I found myself flashing back to my childhood. We had two dogs at that particular point in time. Benji, a Lhasa Apso, and Chance, a Golden Retriever. They trained my family well. Any barking, late into the night, was immediately followed with someone letting them into the garage to sleep. I remember my parents not wanting the neighbors to call Animal Control on us.

The barking kept going all through the night. I wondered if the dog had treed a creature; I wondered if the dog just didn’t want me to sleep. Saturday night and Sunday night, the dogs barked. No response from the owner. No, I think they were sound asleep.
At one point I got up, padded down the hallway to the backdoor and poked my head outside, nothing. The dogs had magically quit barking in those moments. I couldn’t hear anything that might have been causing trouble, so I went back to bed. The dogs began barking again.
By 6:00AM, I think they stopped. I slept really well for about thirty minutes. Climbing out of bed to get ready for work, I felt like we had a baby. The warm shower and coffee not doing much to wake me up.
I drove to work and arrived here safely. A co-worker talked to me, I could hear an edge in my response. You could say that I mildly barked back.
Stupid dogs.