Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Roof Perros
While we're not so naive as to believe San Miguel is free of crime, we don't worry about it all that much. We know other folks must worry about it -- we hear car alarms going off at all hours of the day and night (arrrggghhhh!!!), see the bars on most all ground floor windows and many perimeter walls topped with glistening shards of broken glass. But we live on a small dead-end street in a closely-knit working class neighborhood where everybody pretty much knows everybody else. And just about everybody else has a perro (dog) patrolling the most likely access point for any thief -- the roof. Folks here call them roof perros. You seldom see them in the streets; they live up in their little concrete worlds 24-7. By day, they mostly lounge around or sleep. By night, they restlessly pace and sniff and react to the slightest disturbance, forming a loud chorus of yips and and yelps and howls that in any other place would wake the dead. An intruder might indeed enter your house in the night, but stealth would be out of the question. The noise drove us crazy at first, but by now we've come to think of it as the soothing sound of safety. Anyway, here's a photo of a particularly ferocious specimen during a recent cold snap.
# posted by goots @ 9:27 AM 
