Home

Before mud season begins, there is poop season. And it is a very dangerous time to be a pedestrian.

The temperatures went up and broke the back of winter. The snowdrifts have been planed down to small piles, but as they melted, they belched things out of their strata onto the sidewalk.

It's an archeological excavation of our winter, and the evidence of this civilization is not pretty.

I catalogue our lives as I walk:

Cigarette butts

A smashed can of PBR

A smashed can of Miller High Life

Half of a yellow plastic cup

Dubble Bubble wrapper without the joke inside

Pounds of gravel and scoria

Styrofoam peanuts

An empty packet of Parliaments

Mashed masses of last year's landscaping

One plastic baggie

And piles and piles of the brown stuff.

There is a park near my house in Old Town that is a favorite place for dog owners to go with their pets to throw the tennis ball and give the pooches a bit of a run. There is a poop bag dispenser on the perimeter of this park complete with instructions about how to put your hand in the bag and pick up your little pile of doggie excrement.

This is what happens instead: During the winter, that park turns into a high mesa of snow.

Owners stand at the edge of it, throwing the tennis ball with the tennis ball launcher they bought at the pet store. The dog goes postholing out to fetch it, drooling and wagging his way through the snow.

And somewhere out in that field, the dog lays down a good one. There are very few owners who will posthole out there to the pile of steaming doo just for the sake of the community come March.

I rant now because it is impossible not to think of those doggies these days, as I walk past the park in the middle of the day. The heat from the sun has created a sort of poop incense that wafts through the air and clings to the throat and nose of all passers-by. Including me.

I'm sure digested Dog Chow is a good fertilizer, and if I just readjusted my neural pathways, I could see this as part of the natural process within our urban environment and celebrate.

Until said attitude adjustment occurs, I instead adjust my walking path, giving a wide berth to the poop park.