Monthly Archives: March 2019

It Happens

Spent a big chunk of the afternoon cleaning up shit.

No, this is not a metaphor. We have a dog, and although most of the year we make it a point to clean up the yard daily, it’s been really cold and snowy and rainy and cold and snowy and muddy and cold and rainy and did I mention cold? and I just haven’t been in the mood to do it for a while. And today it’s in the 40’s and dry and actually (I think) supposed to stay warm for many days in a row, and so it was time to get out there and clean up the mess. And today is garbage pick-up day, and although the recycle truck comes early, the garbage truck comes late in the afternoon, so if I got out there and did the turd pick-up quickly enough, I could get it to the curb in time to be taken away from my house today.

So out I went.

The process involves significant risk of stepping on poop land mines, so, wisely, I wore Doug’s shoes (sorry, Dougie, but you weren’t home and your shoes were conveniently located at the back door and I love you!).

In my “reduce/reuse” effort to decrease our plastic impact on the planet, I save produce bags and newspaper delivery bags to pick up after our pooch, and I filled up quite a few.

So here come the metaphors (you knew they were coming):

Health? Life? Politics? Let’s throw in a little of all of the above.

We’ll start with the produce bags: onions, broccoli, and zucchini in, poop out. So the produce bags can be a metaphor for intestines. And we’re discussing chores we don’t necessarily want to do. Perfect segue for an update on the American Cancer Society’s colon cancer screening recommendations. They now recommend that people of average risk for colon cancer begin screening at age 45 (the old recommendation was 50). Gold standard for screening is colonoscopy (starting age 45 and then every 10 years for the average-risk folks). Those at higher-than-average risk likely need to start earlier and do it more frequently. The prep isn’t overly pleasant, but it’s way better than late-stage colon cancer. So talk to your doc about it. This public service announcement brought to you by a bunch of canine backyard bowel movements.

Moving on:

It’s fairly easy to be methodical in the collection endeavor, as our pup is quite consistent in his tendency to defecate along the periphery of our property – he’s an edge-pooper. For the most part, I knew where to look: within a foot of the fence. This is true for most of us. We learn when and where to expect crap. Yes, every once in a while, there’s a big steaming pile in the middle of the lawn where you don’t expect it, but by and large, in the day-to-day, it’s where it usually is. There’s a lot of traffic at rush hour. There are long lines at Trader Joe’s the day before the Super Bowl. You don’t get as much sleep as you’d like when you have exams or when you’re on call. Your spouse is snippy when he/she is under stress. You expect it. You plan for it. You deal with it. It might not be pleasant, but it’s not surprising.

Along the perimeter of our fence we have all sorts of perennials – day lilies, crocuses, hydrangeas, peonies, various other pretty green and/or flowery things that I don’t know the names of. And under the piles of fecal matter I found a plethora of green shoots. The icky and the good are right up next to each other. The fertilizer feeds the flowers.

Much of the excrement has been through multiple freeze-thaw-get-rained-on-and-snowed-on-and-frozen-again-and-thawed-again cycles, and although you can certainly tell that it’s shit, it’s not fresh shit – a lot of it is really dried out and actually somewhat easy to scoop up and most of it doesn’t really even have much of a smell. When life throws general crap at us is can seem pretty awful at first. The fresh stuff stinks – we should pick it up right then and get rid of it, because if you step in it, it embeds in every crevice of your shoe and you have to do the twist on the grass to get the big chunks off and then bring the shoe straight to the utility sink and scrub the rest out of the treads. But if you’ve just stayed away from the crap for a good part of the winter, it might not be so bad when you come back to deal with it later. Works for some things, not necessarily others. Breast lump? Deal with it now. But some things that seem like a big deal right now turn out not to be such a big deal through the lens of time.

Of course, we’d never leave our dog’s waste on the ground when out walking – you don’t leave that for someone else to step in or have to clean up. But we don’t always afford ourselves the same courtesies we give to others. Maybe we should.

I seem to recall I said I’d find a way to tie this to politics as well. I used a bunch of newspaper bags. Need I say more?

Truth be told, I only got around 40% or so of our property’s perimeter-o-poop (there was only so much I wanted to deal with at one time), so will head back out later today or maybe tomorrow. My shoes (well, Doug’s shoes) are clean for now.