Spring

Its finally the time of year when everyone starts quoting poets and musicians recounting how they've survived the dark times and now realize that it is the season of rebirth. Baby bunnies, chicks, pregnant moms at church, etc. I'm going somewhere kind of different so...hang on. Spring, to me, is not about the rebirth of almost everything. It is about the sudden, unavoidable realization that Jeff and I are not nearly as great at rounding up the winter turds in the back yard as we thought. I just spent an hour of quality time with the poop scooper and a 15 gallon pail. The sun felt warm, the outside noises weren't the screaming of the wind across frozen chunks of land meant only for slipping on and awkwardly making your way across. But the poop. Oh the poop. We try to stay ahead of it but for right now and not much longer we are not only combating the build up of our own dogs' collective deposits, we are also wealthy in that of our neighborhood's dogs' poop. Not cool. We NEVER, and I do mean NEVER, let our dogs out of our yard to potty. We go on walks, we take bags for cleaning up after them. They need to go out, we put them on the tie down. But in our self-proclaimed dog friendly neighborhood, we are the minority and it makes me CRAZY. When I'm cleaning up dog poop that there is no physically possible way it was our dogs I get a little bit cranky. I know exactly which dogs are doing it too. It isn't worth going to the neighbors and saying, "Hey. I know we're all friends here but when your dog craps in my yard it makes me feel unstable" and I care too much about my own dogs' safety to accidentally intentionally let them wander directedly into the neighbor's yard for a good ol' poo full of legos and stuffed animal filling. But, I just really need to not know that the neighbors share table food with their dogs, that their dogs have a penchant for eating brightly colored something or other, and that their dogs have too little time to stop and poop so they must poop while walking thereby spreading out their gift to the maximum. Very, very, extremely soon our yard will be fenced. That makes me happy in the dark places of my soul. I'm mildly interested to know how the neighborhood dogs will survive without their (clearly) top choice dumping ground. I imagine the unfenced front yard will be extraordinary this time next year. But I will deal with it as I point and laugh from our fenced back yard. As I think about this all, I realize things about myself. First, I never thought there would be an internally developed dog poop ranking system by which I would find myself living. Example: I would rather use the corner of the poop spade to scrape the soft, water-logged poop out of the grass and onto my scooper than to fish the floaters out of the thawed pockets of ice where the sun hasn't yet melted the ice completely. I would MUCH rather, to an almost dinner table conversation worthy level, scoop hot, fly-covered summer poop than anything produced in the winter or spring. Also, scooping poop midwinter is NOT easy. Even if the snow is soft. You either end up with half your poop slurry being water depending on temperature or you have to chisel the poop out of the ice and you can absolutely expect to get a sudden sensation of something small and cold and mysterious right next to your mouth in the process. Was it a big snowflake? Could have been. But, you know that isn't what you're going to settle on. Nope. It was a bit of chiseled poop ice that flew up and landed right by your pie hole. You can be certain. And there is no way there was only one single tiny piece that came careening through the air toward your face. Is there something on my tongue? Was it there before? How come when I scream I smell dog poop? This is all possible. Getting back to spring, birds are chirping and guys in jacked up trucks with no money to fix the muffler AND feed their family (I tell myself) are frequenting the streets. They have their windows down and no matter what kind of mind-expanding music I'm certain they're listening to, it all gets washed out by other noise which leaves them sounding like a poorly maintained ice cream truck to me. And I would very much like to tell them that. I would also like to give them a bullet point list of the keen and correct observations my 5 and 7 year olds have made while sitting next to them in traffic briefly. But not right now because clearly by the way they just peeled out they're late for their Mensa meeting. So, like I was saying, YAY SPRING!!