They're a pair of mischievous imps and it is useful to keep an alert eye and ear on their silences. Immediate absence from view and surrounding quiet usually spells some kind of mischief. But not always. They're swift and stealthy, and sometimes sneak past us when we're absorbed in doing something, so we aren't aware of their immediate presence, where they shouldn't necessarily be. But their unending curiosity about everything we do and their impulse to be right there as direct witnesses ensures their impulses.

We keep the door to the laundry room closed during the winter months. The laundry room has one door at the side of the house leading to the outside. And the other door leads to the garage. Two doors in a fairly limited space means that the room can get cooler than the rest of the house, and we prefer to keep that cool atmosphere limited to the laundry room itself; the difference in ambient temperature is marked when we do open the door for access to the laundry machines or when we're preparing to exit the house into the garage.

The thing of it is, the ceramic floor there, in the passageway from the kitchen to the laundry room is, like the kitchen and the laundry room, dark blue with black markings. And since our two little rascals are black, and small and quick, we don't always see when they slide past us on our heels into the laundry room as we enter it briefly for any reason. If we are aware they're there, we usher them out and they know what "out!" means. The reason they love going in there is that by leaping about strategically they're able to access mittens, woolly socks and headgear which they love to swift out of the laundry room and into the family room to play with.

As soon as we see what they're energetically trying to pull apart between them in a game of gnaw-and-destroy, we retrieve the item, depriving them of that particular game, briefly. But other opportunities always present themselves sooner or later. The thing of it is, we don't always notice when they've been in the laundry room after us, particularly at night, and often when we're absorbed in other things, we simply exit, closing the door behind us. Leaving one or another of the little mites locked into the room.

Some time afterward we will hear a short, sharp bark. They often emit those barks when they're taunting one another to come and play, and it will take a little while before we realize that one of them is sitting calmly beside us while the other is nowhere to be seen, intermittently barking, until the bark takes on a frantic-puppy tenor, and we realize where the absent puppy happens to be, and take steps to liberate him/her.

At which point the released puppy's gratitude is expressed in wildly ecstatic kissable form.