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Robert Frost meet Taro Gomi. 

I’m fairly certain that this is considered an inappropriate subject but I am going to talk about it nonetheless. This is one advantage of being a little-read blogger. Another is that you don’t have to send out the annual Christmas newsletter because your friends and family have been reading installments all year.

I want to talk about poop. Every member of my family has a poop thing. A few of us like to disappear into the bathroom with reading material and hang out for an indecent amount of time. One of us doesn’t check to make sure he has wiped well enough and so another of us is constantly finding skid marks on his undies on laundry day. Somebody has to be constantly reminded to flush. But when it comes to making Number 2, no member of our family can top the pooping rituals of our family dog.

I’ve explained previously that Paco is a runner. He is, therefore, leash-bound. I am thinking he has some beagle in him because his nose is permanently attached to the ground as soon as we step outdoors. Three seasons of the year, this is fine. Our neighborhood is close to wooded walking trails and in the woods, he is happy. His curly tail bounces, his mouth splits in a doggy grin. When he sees an evergreen scrub tree he circles it like a predator, pees on it several times and then, if the leash holder is lucky, one of his “marks” will turn into a three-legged poop. It’s bizarre. He balances his weight on his front paws (the same paws that he tends to pee on) holding one of his back legs out to the side while arching his back. If a scrub tree is not available, woe is the walker for Paco will only drop the bomb if he is backed up into something prickly. He prefers hemlocks over spruce and pine; he eschews all hardwood varieties. Occasionally, he’ll decide mid-spin that the setting is not quite right and will abort the poop by tugging his human companion to another tree, thereby causing him or her to complain loudly about how weird he is.

Winter has just begun and Paco has already decided that the fluffy white crystals covering his static prey have made them undesirable. The white stuff has so muffled the smells of the woods that it is taking him longer and longer to do his business. When his handlers’ fingers and toes are numb, they beg him to poop on something. When he doesn’t, they conclude he has had ample time to go and will trudge back to the house through the knee deep snow muttering obscenities. On these failed poop days, he will attempt to sneak away to a corner of the living room, release his bowels, and then frolic around in a happy dance. He is often successful. Once, he squeezed out a stealth poop on the cushion of our friends’ couch minutes after we arrived at their house where we were staying for the weekend.

I am at wits end. He is making me crazier than I already am. My children are no longer in diapers. I am done with other mammals’ poop. Is there such a thing as Metamucil for dogs?