Each year, around this time when we hit a miserable stretch of 100+ degree days, I tend to stay inside. A lot. I am not a fan of heat, and I earn the right to complain about it by not complaining once about the cold during the winter. My theory is, you can always add layers, but you can only get so naked. Therefore, cold is obviously more tolerable than heat.

The problem is I start to go a little crazy when I’m stuck in the house all day, so I like to spend the early mornings on my back porch in my lawn chair. The kids are always in bed, the town is quiet, and it’s so peaceful back there I wish I could hit pause and spend a few hours that way.

I am almost always joined by my best buddy, Buster. I keep the house pretty cold, so he loves to go outside and soak up some sunshine. Most days he sits on our storm shelter to soak up the heat from the concrete, but other days he just hits the grass and rolls over like a beached whale. It’s quite a sight, really.

I’ve always envied him being able to beach himself like that, with no one expecting anything of him. Nobody asking him to work, nobody hollering for him to wipe their butt, nobody asking why dinner isn’t done or why their favorite shirt wasn’t ready for school that morning.  He could lie there all day and no one would judge him for it.

But the last time Buster and I sat outside like this, something was different. It was already getting hot, the sun was beating down and there was no breeze. I noticed a shadow pass over him once, but didn’t see what it was. Then it passed over him a second time, and then a third, each time getting progressively larger. I realized then what it was. I looked into the sky just in time to see a massive buzzard swooping down toward poor Buster, mistaking him for fresh meat. I yelled, the buzzard headed back into the sky, and Buster just raised his head and looked at me in disgust for interrupting his nap, completely oblivious to the fact that he was almost lunch for an unbelievably ugly bird.

Now I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere about not being lazy because the world will eat you alive. Read into it whatever you’d like. But me? I’ll just be cooking dinner and wiping butts with a little less complaining from here on out.