The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn

At four o’clock this morning, I awoke to my husband stealing past me to the bedroom door holding a flashlight. I asked what was wrong, wondering if the home invaders were waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and he motioned that Punchy, our older dog and the least complaining, needed to go out. The sun hadn’t yet thought about rising.

Puzzled, not quite understanding the urgency, I got out of bed to discover an enormous, monumental pile of dog poop on the rug, with smaller piles trailing off, like ellipses…..Punchy being a long time sled dog poops on the move. There is no studied motion in his pooping. He was trained to be done and get on with it. Sometimes I love him for this, this remnant of his former life, his perfect carelessness. Other times, it is not so charming.

I stumbled down stairs to the kitchen to grab paper towels, stain remover, and an old towel. Knowing that the pile was too big and awful to be picked up, I ripped the side off a cardboard box that happened to be sitting on the kitchen table holding our supply of Dots and a half a loaf of bread brought back from up north. I would have to scoop up the pile with two pieces of cardboard. It was the only way. So that is what I did, while my husband was standing on the back porch watching our dogs in the yard in the dark, I scooped, retching the entire time, as if it were one of the horrible, hideous toddler-diaper-leaking-smearing catastrophes from long ago.

And then we rolled up the rug and threw it out the back door to be dealt with later and we went back to sleep, the heavy whirring of the fan only slightly successful in erasing the memory of what had just happened. Life goes on.