Mud Nosed Moon Doggie

We Love Dirt

      It’s mud season up here on the hill, which means the paths in the woods are squishy, and walking them is a balance between slipping, sliding, and getting boots stuck.   My dog walks in this season remind me of dreams I’ve had where I’m trying to walk fast, but my feet are slow and I can’t figure out how to change that.   

      But the dogs don’t mind.  Ziggy paddles through puddles and small streams quickly, always looking for something to eat - rabbit poop, old deer bones, anything he calls food.   And he calls almost everything food, except zucchini.

     Luna, on the other hand, rolls joyously in puddles and lays down in streams, lapping at the water, getting her nose into it and then shaking off water in a great spray.  

     I’m told that not all labs actually like water, but she is true to her breed, and has been since she was six months old, when she saw her first pond.  

     I was in my home town of Hudson, NY, my sister and I walking our dogs near the pond where we learned to swim.  Luna walked up to the edge of it and stood there.  I released her from her leash. She walked forward, into the water, and then she began to swim.

     My sister panicked.  “Oh my God! she exclaimed.  “Go get her before she drowns!” 

    “That’s not happening,” I murmured, as I watched Luna swimming in circles in the middle of the pond.  

     Luna’s eyes took on a glazed aspect, as if she’d found her favorite drug.  She swam in circles for ten minutes, totally ignoring me and my sister.  Why would she leave the place where she could be totally her own Lab self?  After another 15 minutes of that, I called her back and she turned toward shore.  When she got to land she shook off water and sighed deeply, as if we’d disturbed her Best Dream Ever.  

     Since then, Luna has been utterly in love with, utterly hypnotized, by any chance to take a swim, or a dip, or a roll in the mud.  In fact, when I brought her to Canine Camp Getaway, a long weekend for doggies and their humans, she swam for 3 hours every day, clearing all the tennis balls out of the pool as if this was the most important job she would ever do.  

Stars+Water+Dirt=Life

     So around here, once the ice thaws and we have water, my dogs are wet, mud nosed, muddy pawed, covered in wet earth and water.   As I tell my friends, I used to have furniture.  Now I have dogs.  Sigh.

     On the other hand, I don’t mind it that much.  I was raised on dirt.  

     When I was growing up it was common practice for parental units to toss their children outdoors early on a Saturday morning, and not expect to see them again until suppertime.  During the daylight hours we played outside, sometimes going to woodsy areas where we could gather wild black raspberries, or make up games about being chased by bears, or sometimes, just digging in the dirt in our yards.

     Sometimes we borrowed a pot from a kitchen and made ‘stone soup’ from dirt, water, leaves, stones, chestnuts fallen from trees.  We’d spin this concoction on the wheels of our bikes as a way of mixing it, then pretend to eat it.  Once our friend Kevin actually did eat some, but he’s a grown man now, so it did him no harm.

     Other times we’d dig in the place where we’d buried our pet turtle, Myrtle, hoping to find her bones, which would be pretty damn exciting.  Or we would dig for China, hoping to get to a place where we’d stand upside down wearing conical hats. We did this until our friend, Nancy Fabiano, suggested we might get to hell before we got to China.  We were Catholic school girls, and believed that was possible.  For a while, we paused.  Then we decided the risk was worth it, and kept digging.    

       To me, dirt is good.  There’s so many different kinds - the thick clay of my childhood yard, the light and almost dusty soil of a house I lived in near Schenectady, NY, the rocky clay mix of where I live now, out of which you might dig up shale, or beautifully textured white grainy stones embedded with small pieces of glinting garnet.  

     Scientists believe that life on earth grew because of dirt.  More specifically, out of clay, which forms a hydrogel with microscopic spaces capable of soaking up liquids like a spong.  Over billions of years, chemicals confined in those spaces could have carried out the complex reactions that formed proteins, DNA, and all the other stuff that makes a living cell work.   

     Life, which came from the stars, needed dirt to bear and raise it.  I am reminded of the most accurate translation of the place in Genesis where humans are created, which reads thus:  Let us make earthlings of the earth.  Male and female we will create them.”

     And if you’re living with a dog, you might as well embrace dirt, because they will drag it into your house. My husband often complains about this.  When the dogs jump in our pond and then roll in the dirt, he throws his hands up and calls out, “Hey!  Hey!  Stop that!”

     When he does so, I remind him that he chose these dogs, with a song I made up special for the occassion,  sung to the tune of “When a Man Loves a Woman.”  It goes like this:

      When a Man has Labrador Retrievers,

       And he also has a pond,

      He can fully expect those dogs will often be wet.

      If a man wants a dry dog, 

      He should have listened to his wife,

      And gotten a Papillon instead.

    Well.  Other Lab owners with husbands will know what I mean.  Though I do highly recommend that you make up songs about your dogs, that’s the subject of another blog.

     For now, I’ll say it one more time:  Dirt is good.  In the Tarot deck, the card of The Fool (and aren’t we all fools) is traditionally shown with a dog nipping at his or her heels.  The Fool is going out into the world, hoping to accomplish a goal.  But that won’t happen unless he or she is grounded in the earth, our constant remindder that even if we came from the stars our bodies, our DNA, was nurtured on this planet, which we should cherish, because she’s always done so for us.  

     Dogs remind of us that.  It’s just one of the many important lessons they teach us - that in a world which leans toward sanitization, dirt is our friend, our mother, our home.  

     You can learn more about my novels and nonfiction books at my website, wildreads.com.

The Roasting of the Peeps

    Yes, it's true.  On Easter I go to a friends house, and we roast Peeps around the fire pit.  They're actually much better that way, because they develop a kind of brûlée crunch on the outside, and the middle is just roasted marshmallow.  You might want to try squishing them between graham crackers with chocolate, in which case they'll be S'More Peeps.  Or you may want to have contests in the microwave to see how big you can make them without having them actually explode.  This is called Peep Jousting.  Because you know the rule:  PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD!