The ice rink in our backyard has melted and the poop soup has surfaced and begun to percolate under the warmth of the midday spring sun.
Forgive me if I ask for just a few more cold days – not freezing, you understand, just frigid – until I can scoop the dog poop into the big pail of, well, poop.
It’s unnerving just how much the waste cycle of a six-pound pooch can muster up, or out, as it were, but it is probably not nearly as unsettling as the Carpenter’s realization that I’ve not kept up to the task since, I’m gonna say, November of last year.
Don’t judge me, fellow dog owners, because you also know that all the best intentions to be the diligent waste picker-upper were all high and mighty before the first frosting of white snow hit the ground.
Like me, you likely insisted to your partner that you would not be lazy with your waste management.
You would never want a repeat of last spring’s vomit-inducing yard work because you had learned your lesson.
Why, just last April I remember telling the Carpenter that I would never again allow the poop to flourish.
I said that as I sifted through the backyard field of brown land mines, with two recycled milk bags for gloves on each hand, finding worms and winged beetles dining out on the mushy piles of dung as I grasped the mess to toss it into the bucket.
Oh, the horror.
The Carpenter enjoyed watching my dramatic flair for disgust, insisting that I was the one who wanted the dog in the first place, and given my dog was only six pounds and thus, not truly a dog in the man sense of the word, it was up to me to deal with the fall out, as it were.
After years of responsibility for two much larger dogs, I recalled the Carpenter was much more helpful. The little dog now residing in our home was my idea, my dog. This is my penance.
I had all the best intentions to do better; really I did.
But then the minus a zillion degree nights were followed by minus a zillion degree days, and then even the dog didn’t want to poop outside, so why would any dog owner in her right mind follow her four-legged friend out into the cold to scoop the poop? Not happening.
And now it’s April. Time’s up.
I accept responsibility for my own yard, but I wish the few negligent dog owners who walk their pups along the Elora Cataract Trail would remember the pathway is not meant to be a hopscotch of canine digestive remnants.
If you wouldn’t litter by leaving garbage on the trail, what makes you think the pathway is a public toilet for your pooch?
Poop soup happens. I get it. But if I have to clean it up, so should you.
It’s going to be a gorgeous Easter weekend. Get out and enjoy it. Walk your dog.
I’ll be busy stirring up the poop soup.