The Week Aunt LaDon Got Snowed In
The Adventures of Gunner the Lab… Oh, and Tiger Too
Story 41: The Week Aunt LaDon Got Snowed In
A Big Moves Story — China Springs, Texas, February 2021
Aunt LaDon had come to Texas to help.
That was the plain fact of it. Her brother — the boys’ dad — had a lot on his plate that February. Grandpa was in the hospital, there was a surgery, and the family had just barely landed in a rented house near Waco with half their life still in boxes. So Aunt LaDon packed a small bag, told her brother she’d be there as long as she was needed, and drove in from out of state to lend a hand and a hug and whatever else a sister brings when things are hard.
She had planned to stay a few days.
Texas had other plans.
Because two days after Aunt LaDon arrived, the sky turned the color of an old nickel, the temperature fell off a cliff, and one of the biggest winter storms in a hundred years came rolling across a state that owned approximately four snow shovels total. Ice on the roads. Snow on the fields. A hard, howling cold that Texas simply was not built for.
Aunt LaDon was not going anywhere. Aunt LaDon was snowed in.
With her brother’s family. In a half-unpacked rental. For a week.
And she had not yet met Gunner.
She met him about four minutes after the snow started sticking.
Aunt LaDon was standing at the back door, coffee in hand, watching the first real flakes come down over a Texas yard that had no idea what to do with them. She was having a quiet moment. A peaceful moment. The kind of moment a person has when they don’t yet know what’s coming.
What was coming was ninety pounds of black Labrador who had just discovered snow and a new person in the same thirty-second window, which for Gunner was roughly the equivalent of winning the lottery twice.
The door opened. Gunner came in like a weather event of his own — a blur of wet paws and cold fur and a tail going so fast it had its own wind chill. He took one look at Aunt LaDon, this wonderful new human he had never smelled before, and made a decision that would define the entire week:
This one is mine.
He leaned his whole body against her legs. He looked up at her with warm amber eyes and the single most hopeful expression a dog has ever produced. Snow melted off his back and onto her socks. And Aunt LaDon, who had come to Texas to help her family through a hard season, found herself instead adopted on the spot by a large, damp, delighted dog.
“Well,” she said, “hello.”
Gunner’s tail somehow went faster.
From the top of the refrigerator — because that was where Tiger conducted his affairs — a gray-brown tabby watched the entire exchange with narrowed golden eyes.
A new human. Interesting. Tiger did not yet have an opinion. Tiger was gathering data.
Here is a thing about a house full of people and one enormous storm and no supplies: it becomes very small, very fast.
They hadn’t had time to stock up. Nobody had. The stores were emptied out before the first flake fell, and then the roads iced over and the whole town simply stopped. So the family made do — which meant careful meals, creative dinners, and a pantry that everyone was quietly keeping an eye on.
Everyone except Gunner, who was keeping a loud eye on it.
Because if there was one thing Gunner understood at a cellular level, it was food. And if there was one thing Gunner understood better than food, it was food that was scarce. He didn’t know what “supply chain” meant. He didn’t know why the humans kept counting the bread. But he knew the energy in that kitchen had changed, and he knew that changed energy always, always circled back to the one topic that mattered most to him in all the world.
Snacks.
So Gunner appointed himself Head of Food Security.
He stationed himself in the kitchen. He supervised every meal with the intensity of a dog who believed, sincerely, that his gaze was the only thing keeping the family fed. When Aunt LaDon made herself a piece of toast — rationed, precious, one of the last few slices — Gunner materialized beside her like he’d been summoned. He did not beg. Begging was beneath the gravity of the situation. He simply waited, pressed against her hip, radiating the quiet message that he was available, if needed, to help with any toast-related emergencies.
“He thinks I’m going to drop it,” Aunt LaDon said.
“He knows you’re going to drop it,” said the youngest boy, Ben, from the floor, where he was operating at his usual two speeds. “Everybody drops it eventually. Gunner just waits.”
Aunt LaDon did not drop it.
Gunner respected the effort anyway. He stayed at her hip the rest of the morning, just in case she reconsidered.
By day three, the power was flickering and the house had gone quiet and cold in the way houses do when everyone’s wearing every sweater they own. And this was when Aunt LaDon discovered the second thing about Gunner:
He helped.
Constantly. Enthusiastically. Ineffectively.
When Dad went out to break the ice on the animals’ water, Gunner helped by galloping ahead and then standing directly in the path, tail wagging, certain he was being useful. When the boys hauled in firewood, Gunner helped by picking up one small stick, carrying it proudly halfway to the house, and then losing interest and dropping it somewhere no one could find. When Mom tried to organize the pantry into a survival plan, Gunner helped by lying down in the exact center of the kitchen floor, a ninety-pound speed bump that everyone had to step over roughly two hundred times a day.
And when Aunt LaDon went outside to see the snow up close — because she was from a place that got snow, and she found the Texas panic charming — Gunner helped with that too.
He helped by rocketing into the yard ahead of her, spinning in delighted circles, and then body-slamming into a snowdrift face-first, coming up with a white beard and an expression of pure, uncomplicated joy.
Aunt LaDon laughed for the first time in days. A real one, from the belly, the kind that surprises you.
“Okay,” she admitted, watching this enormous goofball plow a trench through the snow with his nose. “Okay, he’s ridiculous. I get it now.”
Gunner, hearing his favorite sound in the world — a human laughing at him — did it again. And again. He would have plowed snow with his face all afternoon if it kept her laughing. That was the deal, as far as Gunner was concerned. That was the whole job.
Tiger, meanwhile, was still gathering data.
He had spent three days observing the newcomer the way a general observes a new piece on the board. She had a lap. She had a warm blanket she liked to sit under in the evenings. She had, on two separate occasions, poured a little milk. And — this was the crucial part — she was clearly, obviously, the softest touch in the entire house.
The children were chaos. The parents were busy and could not be bribed. Gunner was competition, plain and simple, a rival for every dropped crumb. But this new one? This Aunt LaDon?
Tiger ran the numbers.
On the fourth evening, as Aunt LaDon settled onto the couch under her blanket with a book, a gray-brown tabby appeared at the far end of the cushion. He did not rush. Rushing was for dogs. He crossed the couch one deliberate paw at a time, sat down beside her with the dignity of visiting royalty, and looked up at her with an expression that said: I have decided to allow this.
“Oh,” said Aunt LaDon, delighted. “Hi, Tiger.”
Tiger permitted one scratch behind the ears. Then, calculating that a slightly pathetic look might accelerate the arrival of milk, he leaned — just barely — into her hand.
It worked. It always worked. Within ten minutes there was a saucer.
Gunner watched this transaction from the floor with open betrayal. His human. His Aunt LaDon. And Tiger had simply walked up and claimed the milk with none of the hard work, none of the loyal hip-pressing, none of the face-first snow diving that Gunner had invested all week.
Tiger finished the milk, cleaned a single whisker, and gave Gunner a look of serene, bottomless superiority.
Gunner sighed the enormous sigh of a dog who does all the work and gets none of the milk, and rested his chin on Aunt LaDon’s foot instead.
Which, honestly, was the better spot anyway. He’d have said so if you asked him.
The week went the way that hard weeks sometimes surprisingly go — heavy in the places that were heavy, but stitched through with small warm moments that nobody planned.
There was a lot of worry in that house. Aunt LaDon had come for the hard part, and the hard part was real, and it stayed real. But in between — in the cracks — there was a dog who could not read a room to save his life and simply loved everyone in it at full volume, all the time, no matter what.
When the evenings got quiet and tense, Gunner would go from person to person, offering his large head for petting, absolutely convinced that ear scratches were the solution to every human problem. And the maddening thing was — he wasn’t entirely wrong. It’s hard to stay clenched up when there’s a warm, hopeful Labrador leaning his full weight against you like you’re the most important person he’s ever met.
Aunt LaDon noticed it. Late one night, unable to sleep, she came out to the dark living room and found Gunner already there, curled on his bed with Tiger tucked into the warm curve of his belly the way the cat had slept since he was a kitten. Gunner cracked one eye open, saw her, and thumped his tail twice against the floor — hello, it’s you, good — without getting up, so as not to disturb the cat.
She sat on the floor beside them for a while. Nobody said anything, because two of them couldn’t and the third didn’t need to. The snow came down outside. The house held its breath. And a big dumb dog and his small strategic cat kept a worried aunt company in the dark until she was ready to try sleeping again.
That was Gunner’s real talent. Not chicken-herding. Not food security. Not any of the jobs he thought he had.
Just being there. Warm and close and certain that everything was going to be okay, because in Gunner’s world, it always was, as long as everyone was together and somebody might drop toast.
By the end of the week, the roads cleared. The great Texas freeze loosened its grip, the snow went to slush and then to memory, and Aunt LaDon’s car could finally make it out of the driveway.
She packed her small bag. She hugged her brother a long time. She hugged the boys, and Mom, and promised to come back when things were calmer.
Then she knelt down on the cold floor and wrapped her arms around a black Lab’s neck.
Gunner leaned in and put his whole heart into it. His tail wagged, but slower than usual — even Gunner, who understood almost nothing, understood that this was a goodbye and not a game.
“You’re a good boy,” Aunt LaDon told him. “You’re a ridiculous, wonderful, good boy.”
Gunner’s tail thumped.
From the top of the refrigerator, Tiger watched her go and offered a single slow blink — which, from Tiger, was the equivalent of a tearful farewell, a marching band, and a twenty-one-gun salute all at once.
Aunt LaDon drove away through a Texas that was still figuring out where to put all that snow.
And Gunner sat at the window and watched the car until it was gone, then turned around, walked to the kitchen, and stationed himself hopefully beneath the table.
Because Aunt LaDon was family now. She’d been snowed in, adopted, betrayed over milk, comforted in the dark, and loved at full volume for one whole week — which was all it took.
And also, it was almost dinner.
And somebody always drops something.
For the aunt who came for the hard part and got a dog instead.