The super goalkeeper (France)

I'm staying in a tiny village, St. Amans, in Tarn et Garonne (NE of Toulouse), in a bohemian house.  Three cats.  One dog: Kali, a shaggy black and white dog.

Kali is a SUPER goalie.  

Even as you're adjusting your foot — one tiny fraction of an inch to the left or right; or half circle; or full circle to face the opposite direction — she'll immediately jerk her head and body in that direction, or run around to the other side, in anticipation of your being about to kick the (tennis) ball that way. 

No matter how many times you do this to try and wrong-foot her before you actually kick the ball, she responds instantly and tirelessly every single time, all the way until you actually kick it.  (And after all that, I'm such a useless footballer that the ball doesn't get very far...)

I'm getting one of the housemates to do a video of this and put it up on YouTube. 

Her goalie skills come in useful, too, when catching the figs I've been picking from the two trees and throwing to her, wolfed down in half a second.

Kali is 11 or 12 years old.  Google says, "Depending on the breed and size of the dog, 10 to 12 years is considered late middle age and the beginning of the elderly years."  Wow, a near-elderly goalkeeper, and so sharp as well at that age!

I’ve just realised, as I'm writing this, that Kali is a sheep dog. No wonder! Her reactions to my foot movements are like how a sheep dog would react to the slightest movements of the sheep while trying to herd them in a particular direction or into the corral.

In the 1964 Disney musical Mary Poppins, the nanny invented a word for the children: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I'm now shortening it and applying it to this wonder goalie dog: Super Kali.

(France, 2018)