You know those mornings where you wonder if your life is actually a sitcom?
Like maybe you are on camera and somewhere, people are watching you flail through your life for their amusement? Yeah, it was that kind of morning.
I knew something was wrong before my feet hit the cold floor. My little dog Scout, who is a terrier mix (or a terror of mixed emotions), waited at the bedroom door, tail wagging. Pee time. Gotta go. Hurry up, already. She pranced to the back door.
I let Scout out to do her business while I stumbled into the bathroom to do my own. Daily routine dictates Scout would be waiting for me to return, but when I discovered she wasn’t, I walked upstairs to put the coffee on.
Minutes passed. I returned to the door, but Scout wasn’t there. She was deep in the snow in the middle of the yard. I waited. And waited. I really wanted my coffee. Scout didn’t care. So selfish. I called out to her. She ignored me.
Finally, I yelled out “treat time” and she came bounding in, tiny snow balls everywhere. We headed upstairs to the treat jar atop the refrigerator, like we do every morning, but something was amiss. She didn’t sit for her treat. She pranced about with her tail down. Unusual, but whatever, I’m not a morning person either so who am I to argue? Scout got her treat and took off.
I turned to put the treat jar back on the fridge, and that’s when I stepped in it. Splat. A tangerine-sized mud splatter that smelled like neither a tangerine nor mud. “What the? Oh sugar” (note: I did not say sugar).
I looked up to see Scout at the bottom of the stairs doing the bum-scoot across the hardwood floor, leaving a brown skid mark in her wake. It wasn’t mud. Despite my urging, Scout has failed to learn to use toilet paper, and thus, there was a little mess in her fur. It happens. I would prefer it would happen after I consumed coffee, meditated and had been awake enough to deal with this, but it wasn’t in the sitcom script. Dog people understand this. We love our dogs.
Fun was in the script, though. My furry friend with poor hygiene thought we were playing a game. The rules were simple: Scout would bum-scoot around the floor, leave a mark, then run a few steps and do it again, while I crawled behind her spraying the floor with a cleaner and wiping up the mess, gagging profusely.
It was a sight, to be sure. The arrogant cats were amused by the spectacle of a horrified woman in a pink fluffy bathrobe hobbling about, retching obscenities, smelling of lemon cleaner and, well, not lemon cleaner.
Scout was about to up the ante. She made a run for the couch. The suede-textured couch. In a demonic voice, fueled by desperation and a lack of caffeination, I erupted, arms flailing, “No! Not the couch!”
Scout stopped abruptly, looked back at me, unsure what all the fuss was about, but aware she should reassess her couch leap. Our eyes met. Show down. I calmly reaffirmed my request. Stand down, Scout.
Two showers happened that morning. It was clean comedy.
Life is messy. Poop happens. Dogs are worth it.
