The Tree of Good and Evil

My phone rang at 5:20 a.m.  This is never good news. I tumbled out of bed envisioning the worst....and I don't mean just a bad haircut that makes me cry for a week.
"Hello, I have Lucky," said the unfamiliar voice.
Of course my first thought was , Good, please keep him. I hoped and prayed it was a dog-napping and they wanted a huge ransom we could not pay. Anything over $1. My second thought was how did he escape the wire crate, and the yard?
Arvo woke up and told me he had not crated Lucky last night. Apparently, on his night out of his prison, Lucky decided to run away from home. The caller, Becky, had had an unaccountable urge for chocolate. (At 5 a.m.?) and had seen Lucky out on the busy road outside our neighborhood. She did not demand money in exchange for his life to my grave disappointment.
Lovely, just lovely.

"He is an awesome dog!" she said, obviously on some chocolate induced psychosis.
I reverted to my first thought since she obviously found him much more awesome than I sure did in my bleary eyed and infuriated state.

Becky was a real angel though. She told me she would drop him right off. So she pulled in to our driveway, with Lucky in the back seat. He hopped out and I resisted the urge to kill him. When I got him in, I closed off the dog door. I heard a rustling from the boys' bedroom and ran in to see him pawing at the window. I chased him out of there, and a few minutes later heard scratching again. This time he had climbed up on the couch and was pawing at the dining room window, trying to claw his way outside.

So I opened the dog door and watched. He ran out. Then he stood in the yard a while, as though he had not just been the stupidest dog on earth, and then came back on the deck and pawed to be let in. The dog door, to his left, was open and readily available for his convenience. The dog that can escape every enclosure known to man did not seem to know he could come in using the dog door that he has used for 8 years.
I brought him in and put him in the wire crate so I would be able to eat breakfast without having to chase after him. Within minutes, I heard frantic scratching and saw that he had busted his head out the back of the wire crate. I got rope and tied it but know this fix is probably also only temporary. I am at a complete loss about what to do or why he is behaving this way.

Those mountains  and quiet balcony I left behind in Lexington have assumed an even greater allure

It is Adam and Eve enacted in canine theater. The dog is in the Garden of Dog Delight. He has food, water, shelter, several couches, several dog beds, toys, a huge yard.... he may have anything he wants except one thing. He may not leave the yard for if he does, he will surely be hit by a car and die.
"Surely your Master jests!" hoots the owl from the oak tree,"He is a cruel Master to deny you freedom, the one thing that separates you from being just like Him. If you escape over the fence, you will be on equal footing with all the free humans on the earth, and you will see, it is much better than what your selfish and stingy Master has given you."
The dog tasted of the bite of freedom, and saw that it was good. And over the fence he flew.Or maybe under. Or perhaps through. I have not yet found how he managed to get out of the Garden.

On one level, I sympathize. It often is what we can't have that we long for the most. We give up the pleasures at hand thinking what is denied us is far better. And then when we are locked out, wandering on a highway with cars rushing around us, we wish (if we are more than dog-brained) that we had recognized sooner how blessed we were in the safety of the Master.

Genesis 2:16-18 (New International Version)

¹⁶ And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."