{"id":34,"date":"2008-04-14T19:42:55","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T00:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaybuena.com\/blog\/?p=34"},"modified":"2008-04-14T19:42:55","modified_gmt":"2008-04-15T00:42:55","slug":"34","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/34\/","title":{"rendered":"The Little Girl Who Burned Down The Dog House &quot;It weren&#039;t my fault.&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:42,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/kaybuena.com\\\/images\\\/sm195507xxCASLittleIndianGirlatWattsLake.jpg&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20251101071940\\\/https:\\\/\\\/kaybuena.com\\\/images\\\/sm195507xxCASLittleIndianGirlatWattsLake.jpg&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2025-11-16 22:47:43&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2025-12-06 05:26:05&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2025-12-20 11:49:16&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-01-23 15:08:00&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-02-02 03:08:16&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-02-06 15:26:39&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-02-23 23:20:23&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-11 05:59:13&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-17 01:27:55&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-29 03:04:50&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-29 03:04:50&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p><a title=\"Little Indian Girl at Watt's Lake, 1955\" href=\"https:\/\/kaybuena.com\/images\/sm195507xxCASLittleIndianGirlatWattsLake.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"border: 0; float: right; margin: 6px;\" src=\"https:\/\/kaybuena.com\/images\/tn195507xxCASLittleIndianGirlatWattsLake.jpg\" alt=\"Little Indian Girl at Watt's Lake, 1955\" width=\"112\" height=\"166\" \/><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once upon a time in a place far away from Austin, Texas, there lived a little\u00a0idiot girl\u00a0named Caroline and her family, who went all over the place,\u00a0and she hated them all because of that.\u00a0 And who would not?\u00a0 Little girls like to feel cared for, secure and comforted,\u00a0not dragged around like some old chair no body cares much &#8217;bout, especially when they&#8217;re young.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now, oddly enough, that Little Girl changed, -overnight- \u00a0into a grizzlie Old Lady, who&#8217;s hand&#8217;s looked like a combination of her mother&#8217;s and her father&#8217;s hands, when they got old ( but it was like you could see both of their hands at the same time, every time she looked down at them, and they wouldn&#8217;t change back.\u00a0) And she hated them all because of that too.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 About the only thing\u00a0truly good about her family, besides herself and\u00a0her dog, Jenny,( well&#8230;maybe Jenny was really the only good one among that lot) she thought,\u00a0but the truly good thing about her family that made them real speacial, was her father was kin to Pocahantas&#8217; son.\u00a0 Now, she was aware that this seemed like some form of somebody else&#8217;s idea of a load of horse doo, but it&#8217;wer the God&#8217;s honest truth.\u00a0 She had\u00a0seen the proof of that\u00a0 fact with\u00a0her very\u00a0own eyes, &#8217;cause one of her cousins did a big deal Thesis, and done got &#8220;a amster&#8217; degree&#8217; from college, which I &#8216;spect is better than a regular degree, but it&#8217;s hard to say. First time\u00a0she heard that one, she though her cousin got a &#8220;hamster\u00a0degree&#8221;, which sounds allot more likely.\u00a0 But in truth, she did see with her own two eyes\u00a0from copies of the &#8216;census&#8217; taken over the years, where you could follow that group back to who was who&#8217;s mother and dad and all that, and the\u00a0&#8220;piece of resistance&#8221; was the original land grant given to her grandmother&#8217;s family from King George III.\u00a0Those <span style=\"color: #993300;\">kin<\/span> of her&#8217;s must have been nuts as a cheezeball, cause old King George of England was crazy as they come; so he must have liked &#8217;em right fine, cause they got an enormous acreage, at the time it was given- it was something like 6,ooo acres of prime farming land in the Virginia territory.\u00a0 She thought it out and was\u00a0pretty darn sure if\u00a0her dad was kin to Pocahontas&#8217;s son, &#8216;chances are\u00a0just as good that her father\u00a0 (and this Little Girl that turned into a grizzled Old Lady) were &#8220;kins&#8221; with\u00a0that old boy&#8217;s\u00a0mothers &#8216;s-well, that&#8217;d be Pocahontas&#8217; hereself.\u00a0 It weren&#8217;t hard to follow that reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That means that some part of that little girl was really an\u00a0Indian, from\u00a0 the Virginia\u00a0territories. She didn&#8217;t know what part that were, but\u00a0it didn&#8217;t matter much.\u00a0\u00a0So she decided to start\u00a0 play-acting with her dog,\u00a0 Jenny (she&#8217;s part border collie, which are very smart dogs)\u00a0in\u00a0the Old Dog\u00a0House right back of this particular house,\u00a0that&#8217;s one of the houses they lived in when they went all over the place; And since she learned as how she was part Indian, for real, she could\u00a0slip into that role quite naturally and easily, &#8216;speacially with\u00a0that striped\u00a0towel wrapped around her shoulders like an indian blanket. But even though she was pretending,\u00a0she really was an Indian Girl\u00a0all by her self, with her dog in front of an unlit\u00a0cooking-fire,\u00a0inside a little\u00a0old house, (so that was like ironic\u00a0or doublely strange)&#8211;Only she was too little, or too stupid, or too much of an idiot (like I said about her in the first place) so\u00a0it seemed she\u00a0weren&#8217;t able to figure in a lot of important stuff she\u00a0was needing\u00a0to learn about later, but after all she was only 6 years old.\u00a0What could you expect, Rocket Science?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0First off,\u00a0she was gonna have a cooking fire like &#8217;twas done\u00a0when she saw Indians in the movies, but instead she &#8216;oughten&#8217; to have put the fire in a more practical place, like outside,\u00a0but she made up\u00a0a right nice fire by the front\u00a0of the door opening, so the other Indians would see the glow of the fire and know she was back there in that dog house.\u00a0It\u00a0didn&#8217;t seem like a bad Idea at first, &#8217;cause it\u00a0was just\u00a0going to be\u00a0a little\u00a0fire.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When Jenny saw that one coming on, she took off quicker&#8217;d you could spit, cause she was one fine smart doggie.\u00a0 But The little Indian\u00a0Girl stayed right there, still staring into the fire, as it grew from the leaves she put on the bottom of the little\u00a0dried tree branches she&#8217;d collected and carefully\u00a0put all up into a stepel shape\u00a0there, all by herself.\u00a0 \u00a0And\u00a0the fire\u00a0was so pretty, and it smelled real good, &#8217;cause the branches came from under\u00a0an apple tree in that back yard. But about the time she first noticed her fire was getting too big,\u00a0there sort of whooshed out a strange noise, not like the fires she&#8217;d watched and listened to\u00a0in fire places in other houses.\u00a0 It sounded sort of like a whistling tune, but real quiet like it was whisperin to her,\u00a0but with no real stable melody to it.\u00a0But\u00a0it was\u00a0nice and warm inside that Dog house, and then the fire started to look stronger and bigger than she figured it&#8217;d\u00a0ever grow on to be. She seemed to be hypnotized, but\u00a0not in that weird way where\u00a0her\u00a0eyes would be going all in circles like the way they was always doin\u00a0in the cartoons,\u00a0but in a peaceful, solid way, as she continured to look into her &#8220;cookin&#8217; fire&#8221;,\u00a0and she wasn&#8217;t &#8216;ascared like she knew she ought to be. Then the\u00a0&#8220;cooking fire&#8221; started catching onto the wood of the dog house,\u00a0first\u00a0into the floor and then\u00a0up one side, and then to the other side.\u00a0\u00a0But\u00a0there she\u00a0sat, cross-legged in the back of all that as\u00a0&#8217;twas goin on at the same time.\u00a0 \u00a0Only when the fire was a whole lot bigger than she was, did she understand that she was probably going to be on fire too, pretty much the\u00a0next thing,\u00a0cause it wouldn&#8217;t stop. And that wouldn&#8217;t be so pretty, and that wouldn&#8217;t smell real good either.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was so smokey in there, kind of like when her parent&#8217;s gave parties and every one was smoking ci-gars only worse than that, but the wind outside started kicking up &#8217;cause she could hear that too.\u00a0 Then some\u00a0way out of that wind,\u00a0came a strange sounding,\u00a0moving real big shapeless thing that looked like it was a bunch of\u00a0darker smoke, but\u00a0 was real fast-like. And it\u00a0wasn&#8217;t coming\u00a0from her little puny legs and idiot head, that did this, but\u00a0that smoke thing just sort of quicker you&#8217;d ever think any thing was possible, or any one she ever saw could do\u00a0(and she was a fast runner herself, so she was on to what fast was), what ever that smoke thing was had her <em>out of<\/em>\u00a0 and on the out side of that fire so quickly, she couldn&#8217;t even speculate or\u00a0figure when it was done!\u00a0 But she was out on the other side of the fire,\u00a0still left sitting cross-legged, but definely\u00a0outside of the burning dog house.\u00a0\u00a0And\u00a0that weird smoke-soundin&#8217; whistlen\u00a0continued, all during\u00a0this that happened, and\u00a0allot\u00a0weirder than\u00a0her brother&#8217;s eyes when he crossed&#8217;em and\u00a0he whistled out the space a&#8217;ween his front teeth,<em> that<\/em> was her usual\u00a0&#8220;too\u00a0strange&#8221; thing, but not nearly as strange as that dark stuff that looked like compacted\u00a0smoke, whisperin that quiet same whistling tune with no real\u00a0melody to it.\u00a0 And then\u00a0that thing\u00a0just faded into the direction the wind blew the smoke.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The little Indian Girl\u00a0figured she ought to walk that way too, only real fast,\u00a0so\u00a0she wasn&#8217;t there when her family noticed what&#8217;d happened.\u00a0\u00a0 She might even find that same whistling wind-thing that took her out of that fire, cause she could have still been in the back\u00a0where she&#8217;d be all black and burnt up, but she wasn&#8217;t; cause there she was, walking real fast, only\u00a0 all covered with some black dirt, and the ends of her braded hair were sindged too;\u00a0but she kept looking around\u00a0 where she was, tryin&#8217; to figure\u00a0how that might have\u00a0happend in some reasonable way, even though there wasn&#8217;t any clue &#8216;sept that\u00a0sound went where she followed.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0But she found nothing there once she got way far\u00a0from\u00a0the smoke,\u00a0she\u00a0kept on walking that\u00a0direction just for good measure,\u00a0afor quite some time, cause she was way on down their street almost to the end of it,\u00a0just thinking about what had happened that afternoon.\u00a0 She even figured she didn&#8217;t really hate all her family either, only when they got real mad at her, like if she burned down the dog house on purpose or something. The she stopped walking and breathed real hard and stood real still, and went back to face the music, cause she couldn&#8217;t go on walking that way any further.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The\u00a0 whole Dog House and most everything near there\u00a0was all burned down, and ruined, and black, and gone\u00a0that day. \u00a0Even the climbin&#8217; &#8216;Old Roses&#8221; next door on that fence that surrounded the back yard were that way too,black and mostly gone. There was\u00a0only one big (\u00a0mostly\u00a0blurt up)\u00a0red rose left\u00a0hanging on\u00a0to the fence. She went there and took that away\u00a0cause it was too\u00a0awful to see.\u00a0What was the Dog House was so\u00a0awfully charred and gone, and every one\u00a0in her family (that she&#8217;d mostly hated for pretty stupid reasons) were so truly sad about\u00a0what happened there in the back yard , she could tell by looking at their faces. I think her mother had cried while she was out walkin&#8217;, but then\u00a0 her mother looked real stern and went back inside the big house.\u00a0The Little Indian Girl wished she could tell them about how that whistling smoke thing\u00a0moved her out back of the fire, on to the outside yard. But she knew that wouldn&#8217;t believe her, &#8220;her and her stories.&#8221; Now, she hated herself too, even though what happened was miraculous and true, and it weren&#8217;t her fault, really.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 It stayed that way until her dad, took all that old black,\u00a0left-over burned wood away.\u00a0And her dad knew how to plant\u00a0pretty green plants,\u00a0in that place, a whole lot of new pretty bushes and flowers, so you&#8217;d never know about what&#8217;d happend. What was\u00a0that dog house, I &#8216;spect, were&#8217;t nary a piece left over,\u00a0and she got to be the one\u00a0who mostly\u00a0helped him put those new green plants too. Even when she looked at her brother, and\u00a0he was doing that eye-crossed whistle thing to make fun of her, that seemed alright.\u00a0 Even though they did that and it was so much better to see, she still felt\u00a0real guilty, cause she knew <strong>she was the<\/strong> <strong>little<\/strong> <strong>Indian\u00a0girl<\/strong> that caused\u00a0that fire, but she wasn&#8217;t brave enough to say it were her that made that fire.\u00a0And\u00a0they\u00a0would\u00a0have hated her too. She\u00a0had some suspicions they knew it was her that was bad; but they never said nothing &#8217;bout that, not one word.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0By the next Spring, that yard was more pretty\u00a0than it ever had been.\u00a0Only thing that was bad, was the Old Red Roses\u00a0to the front of that house that\u00a0used to bloom so pretty,\u00a0the one&#8217;s\u00a0climbed over a\u00a0white arched trellis there,\u00a0died on down to the roots\u00a0for no reason we could figure. \u00a0I guess sometimes that just happens. Even when The Little Indian Girl turned into being that Old Grisslie Lady, she&#8217;d think about what happened back then. Sometime&#8217;s she&#8217;d cry too, but it wasn&#8217;t\u00a0a&#8217;cause the dog house burnt down, it was a&#8217;cause they were all gone but her-and they never even knew what really happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once upon a time in a place far away from Austin, Texas, there lived a little\u00a0idiot girl\u00a0named Caroline and her family, who went all over the place,\u00a0and she hated them all because of that.\u00a0 And who would not?\u00a0 Little girls like to feel cared for, secure and comforted,\u00a0not dragged around like some old chair [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-true-and-unusual-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s8R4qt-34","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":74,"url":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/betty-jane-meets-little-richard\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":0},"title":"2. Betty Jane Meets Little Richard and James Brown","author":"Kay Buena","date":"January 1, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once in the line of duty, *\"Betty Jane\", my\u00a0childhood's favorite doll\u00a0and clever female detective, associate of the master crime fighter of yester-year \"Foxie\" (see Betty Jane's laundry day, where she \"unplugs\" that box thing (my old Dell Computer)\u00a0and hangs up her wet laundry all over it's parts and portals,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;(The) Betty Jane Chronicles&quot;","block_context":{"text":"(The) Betty Jane Chronicles","link":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/category\/the-betty-jane-chronicles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Betty Jane","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/kaybuena.com\/images\/04S04BettyJaneJamesBrownPlus425x223.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":404,"url":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/dont-you-hate-that-added-3rd-party-existention-well-so-did-bettyjane\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":1},"title":"11. Don&#8217;t you hate that added 3rd party existention?&#8230;Well so did BettyJane","author":"KayBuena","date":"May 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When we first encountered my very favorite childhood doll, Betty Jane, she had been missing from the household for some time, approximently 55 years.\u00a0 Thou she had been carefully attended to by my mother, untill my parents moved to Salado, Texas.\u00a0 I truely became reaquaninted with Betty Jane, after\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;(The) Betty Jane Chronicles&quot;","block_context":{"text":"(The) Betty Jane Chronicles","link":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/category\/the-betty-jane-chronicles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18,"url":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/pianos-i-have-known-and-loved\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":2},"title":"Piano&#039;s I Have Known and Loved","author":"Kay Buena","date":"September 8, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Sometime between the age of 2 and 4 years old, my parents got me a toy piano.\u00a0 It was white and shaped like a baby grand, but only had two octaves (from\u00a0 G below middle C---to G above middle C).\u00a0 I thought this was the most wonderful thing, although thinking\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1157,"url":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/ghost-of-madness\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":3},"title":"Ghost of Madness","author":"KayBuena","date":"February 27, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"MP3 You saw a girl with the ghost of madness in her eye You wanted to know why she looked that way but you were shy And because you knew that secret kind of madness, too Didn't you, didn't you? You saw a girl with a gleam of passion in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Music&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Music","link":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/category\/music\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/GoMcover.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":292,"url":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/7-what-happened-to-betty-jane\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":4},"title":"7. What Happened to Betty Jane","author":"","date":"June 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"So out of nowhere (while I was wondering where B.J. had gone) she walked inside my house, which scared the f___ing Hell out of me (which was a personal first for sure). And lo and behold that doll and become a Rastafarian! \"Oh, s___ in a hand basket,\" I screamed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;(The) Betty Jane Chronicles&quot;","block_context":{"text":"(The) Betty Jane Chronicles","link":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/category\/the-betty-jane-chronicles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/kaybuena.com\/images\/20090630BettyJaneRasta.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":41,"url":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/betty-janes-laundry-day\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":5},"title":"1. Betty Jane&#039;s Laundry Day","author":"Kay Buena","date":"August 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0 Betty Jane is the kind of doll that most kids can tell is a doll to \"play with\" and not just look at.\u00a0 My mother gave me the dubious and questionably intelligent Betty Jane, on my 4th birthday.\u00a0 At first\u00a0with her\u00a0long blond hair and a surprised look, and prim\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;(The) Betty Jane Chronicles&quot;","block_context":{"text":"(The) Betty Jane Chronicles","link":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/category\/the-betty-jane-chronicles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Betty Jane","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/technologists.com\/photos\/2004\/sm04S00BettyJane.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kaybuena.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}