Yes, I’ve Become That Woman

Yesterday Chris called me from the highway to let me know he was nearly at our house. Chris was going to take me to the library, and because we were on a tight schedule, I went outside to wait for him after taking care of the dogs.

He hadn’t shown up yet, so I started walking down our driveway. And then I saw it.

Someone had left two big piles of dog poop on our lawn.

Each pile was about the size of two days of all three of our dogs’ poops combined, or the size of one regular dog’s output. And these were fresh poops, too–I’d just spent all Monday afternoon raking the pine needles in that area, and there had certainly been no poo piles then.

Our neighborhood is very dog-friendly. Our street alone houses eight resident dogs, not including those that live on the intersecting streets. On most summer days, a walk around the neighborhood will typically have us running into three or four dogs along with numerous children of various sizes.

When we’d first moved into this house, all the dog owners in the area had warned us about one particular woman on the corner, who hated dogs going on her lawn and would stick up signs saying “A Dog Pooped Here” and other witticisms when she found evidence that a dog had visited.

Although I’d kept a careful, and hopeful, eye out for these signs, I had never seen any. And the woman always seemed perfectly friendly to us and our dogs, but that may have been because we made sure to walk our dogs on the other side of the street from her house.

Normally all the poop on our lawn belongs to our dogs, and we generally try to pick it up every day or so and throw it in the trash. Picking up poop is not a fun thing to do, but it’s part of being a dog owner. If other people choose to leave their dog’s poop on their own lawns, that’s their business — but I expect them to at least respect other people’s lawns.

But seeing those two big piles of poop on our lawn, blatantly belonging to dogs that weren’t mine…well. Something inside me snapped.

I marched down the street, fuming. Before I’d walked too far, I spotted Chris’s car. He circled around and picked me up.

“Guess what happened,” I said. Yes, there was no time for things like “Hi” or “How was your day?” in my world when a crisis loomed.

“Do I want to know?” Chris said.

“Somebody left their dog poop on our lawn! Two big piles!” I announced. “What can we do about this?!?”

“That’s life,” Chris said. “Shit happens.” He giggled to himself. “Shit happens — get it?”

“I get it,” I said.

After we returned from the library, I made Chris examine the poop with me.

“TWO big piles,” I said. “What, did a dog have a stomachache? Why are the poops so close together?”

I studied the poop. By now, Chris had looked at the poop and agreed that, yes, there were indeed two piles of poop on our lawn, and they did not belong to our dogs.

“Why are people so rude? Maybe I should put up signs on the poop piles, too, just like that woman down the street,” I yelled, to Chris’s retreating back.

“The crazy lady? What good will that do?” Chris called back.

“Well, she doesn’t get any poop left on her lawn anymore,” I pointed out.

“Then maybe it works,” Chris said.

I went inside and busily typed up and printed two signs on my computer. Chris found some old chopsticks that he’d been saving for some kind of as-yet-undetermined project, and I carefully taped my signs to the chopsticks.

I went back outside and in the dimming light, drove each chopstick into the ground near each pile of poop.

I felt better.

And I felt even better when I went outside today to check on my chopsticks, and found that both piles of poo had disappeared. Not every piece had been picked up, but the majority of the poop was gone.

Ah, the sweet smell of success.

Note: The pictures are fuzzy because although Chris got me a new digital camera that rocks the shiznit out of the hizzle, I was in a rush to take the pictures because a car was coming down the street toward me and I felt they might not see me over their giant minivan and would run me over if I stayed out in the street any longer. You will be pleased to know that they did not run me over, however, I didn’t have time to focus the camera. You can’t have everything, you know.

Posted by: ssjane | October 21, 2005 | 4:31 pm
Posted in: This Life