Day #70 Writing Through COVID-19: What Does the Dog Say?

Yesterday's morning conversation:

Good morning, Mom. What are you reading?
The dictionary! I'm a terrible speller!
What word are you looking up?
Die.
"Die" like we're all going to die, or "dye" like dye your hair?
Both!
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I brought you a poem about fairies by William Shakespeare.
(We read the Fairy's song from "Midsummer Night's Dream.")
I didn't know Shakespeare wrote poems. (She used to.)
Yep. Mostly sonnets. Here's one of my favorites.
(Sonnet 130, "My Mistress's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun.)
(Laughing) She looked terrible!
(We next read a poem/passage from The Tempest that includes these lines:)

Hark, hark!
    Bow-wow.
              The watch-dogs bark.
    Bow-wow.
              Hark, hark! I hear
              The strain of strutting chanticleer
              Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

A dog's bark doesn't sound like bow-wow.
(I perform some very dog-like bow-wows. My mother laughs. She's such an easy audience.)
Ducks don't really say "quack" either.
(I'm quacking now, and the barnyard sounds wake my dad who ambles out of the bedroom, ghostlike in white longjohns. My mother is back to musing on the question we've all been pondering since babyhood: What DOES the dog say?)
I think a dog says "Grr!"
Let's see if that's in the dictionary.
(I return to the American Heritage, open to "die" on the sofa. "Grrr" is not listed, but I wonder aloud about who decides which words are accompanied by illustrations and which ones aren't.)
The nouns get pictures!
(My eye lands on a sketch of a thin pioneer, standing by a tree.)
Who was Johnathon Chapman? (My parents love a good trivia question.)
(From deep within my mother's brain)
Of Johnathon Chapman
two things are known
that he loved apples 
And he lived alone!
(I look up Jonny Appleseed Ballad and read it aloud. My mother chimes in on the final stanza.)
Consider, consider,
Think well upon
The marvelous story
Of Appleseed John!

Enough.
Be well.
Write.

Allison