Dog poop

One of those nights. The ‘almost-summer’ kind. A “sure there’s a grand ole stretch in the evening” and my it’s just not quite warm enough for a t-shirt and shorts. Here in that hopeful moment where a wafting, lilting breeze song carries the trace of a distant neighbour’s first BBQ of the season, I breathe in, and my tummy rumbles.

Summer time…and the living is easy…doo doo when the moon hits the sky like a big pizza pie it’s amore…jaunty little summer tunes whisper across my thoughts as I notice a shiver of post daylight savings early evening sunlight lazily snake it’s way through the April blooms. My perspective trips and lands on the $5 pooper scooper I hold in my hand, it’s jaws locked on one of several hundred piles of fuzzy petrified dog poop strewn across my back garden.

Ah yes the consequences of my own actions, we meet again.

Sweat needles away at the corner of my eye and a cold trickle slips down my back. All the cold winter mornings and early evenings I called the dogs in and turned a blind eye to the smouldering craters in the snow in which a little poopling was beginning it’s hibernation haunt me. Regret and resentment towards the me of the past rise in my throat and I let out a long low sigh at my own half-arsed attitude to “this year being the year I am proactive about taking adult responsibility of my life and the creatures under my care.” Best save that for next winter, when we do this exact same thing once again to ourselves ,resignation treads in bitterness’ departure.

I cast my useless scoop aside and get down on my hands and knees. Casting a withering glance at my doe eyed dogs sat watching me, panting happily, so begins the arduous task of finger picking the fluffy fossilized excrement from the grass in which it is deeply knotted. Poop does not return to nature under the frozen snow, it sits waiting to shit on your mother-fluffin summer dreams year in year out when you sacrifice those lovely first few summery evenings to playing catch up.

I sit on my heels, only a couple hundred more piles to go and then we can set up the outside furniture and have a proper seeing in of the season. Quite suddenly, a noticing. A pause and leaves begin to rumble and whirl their way through the air, the dogs have begun to snuff up and eat the fuzzy popsicles. On second thoughts….maybe I’ll just deal with this next week.

-First drafted in April 2020 in Indiana where the Winters are long and brutal but Spring and Summer are the best I’ve ever found anywhere.