Hide and Seek, Mabel-Style - By Maryanne Tuck Grimmett

The ham-bone hiding, hide and seek ninja, Mabel

Call me crazy, but I love to muck stalls.  For some reason, nothing frees up my brain quite like shoveling horse poop into a wheel barrow.  It’s my thinking time.  And it also affords me the opportunity to witness my dog doing what she does best—clowning around.

            Mabel carries around a huge bone, a ham hock sans the ham.  She takes it from stall to stall, and, within each stall, corner to corner.  With six stalls each boasting four corners, that’s twenty-four corners.  And at each corner, she does the same thing.  She uses her gargantuan paws to shovel out a shallow hole, deposits the bone, and uses her long nose to push sawdust up over it.  After doing so in Corner A, she exits the stall for a few minutes before returning, circling the stall, digging up the bone, and duplicating said steps in Corner B, Corner C, and Corner D.  Every single time, she seems pleasantly surprised to find the bone and joyously excited about repeating the process in the next stall.  It’s a grand game of solitary hide-and-seek, wherein she’s both the hider and the searcher, and she is never disappointed.

            As if that’s not weird enough, she’s taken to playing the game in our house, where there is neither horse poop nor sawdust.  There are, however, a multitude of corners, and Mabel makes the best of them.  On many occasions, I’ve watched her haul an object into a corner, scratch at the ground, shove the object into the “hole,” and push imaginary sawdust over it with her nose.  She then trots away, a satisfied look on her wrinkled face and her long ears dragging behind her.

            The crazy thing is, in her mind, that object is covered, securely shielded from view by a mound of sawdust impenetrable to the naked eye.  In fact, it’s so well hidden that even she will walk right by it in search of another bone. 

            Mabel's one-dog game of Hide and Seek is self-imposed.  Deep down, I think she knows I’ll play with her.  In fact, I have a track record of prioritizing her, even over-rewarding her simple successes with exaggerated treats and praises.  Yet she chooses to play alone.

Kinda makes me think of me.  Even though He has proven Himself time and time again, I sometimes forget I have access to Him.  So I play the game of life solo, facing problems and fears on my own without consulting the One who actually has control over them.  But, wouldn’t you know, when I do trust in Him, He has that same habit of rewarding me with treats beyond my capacity of earning. 

How amazing.  The God of the universe patiently waits for me to acknowledge my desperate need for Him, so that we can traverse this road that leads from life into eternity as friends with no secrets on either side.