Diego the Wonder Dog has taken to placing his current bone on the step attached to my French doors. I give him these marrow-stuffed treats as they appear at the butcher’s locally on occasion; he loves them; it satisfies his need to gnaw and lick (the marrow lasts about 5 minutes) and when he is so occupied, he does not bark. This is good, as when it is very hot and humid – despite central air, it cannot be avoided – I greatly prefer less barking; the heat has been oppressive at times this summer, making my head feel like it’s filled with hot soup. There is no need to add his booming voice to the steaming brew…
These bones are his to pick, and I find it endearing that he does this new thing, placing them in this spot. I think he’s doing it because he’s just so darned smart; he’s realized that when momma mows the lawn his special bones disappear as momma tosses those treats – with which he is never done – off the lawn beyond his reach and the reach of the sharp, motorized blades. Remember mom tossing clothing with which you weren’t done? Oh yes. Ouch! Mom! I loved those socks! Too bad, kid, too bad. Same shit, different species.
Speaking of shit, my bone to pick is with a nearby neighbor. Transplants from elsewhere who have been hunting locally for decades, they recently bought a small farmhouse down the road a bit, which they’ve been renovating. Yay! I introduced Diego and myself one day – we often walk there – and he seemed perfectly pleasant. Sigh. Their road is one I visit with the big boy pretty much daily as it is close by, is a town road, nice and level and well-maintained, plus it gets almost no traffic (there are only 4 houses on the road, which is about 3 miles long) other than wildlife, along with one or two other walkers, joggers, bikers, and doggie mom/dad singletons or combos walking their fur babies.
One afternoon in July, I was out on that road with Diego; a group of kids, 9 to 12 or 13 year olds as I assessed them, were accessing the creek that runs along the road to swim and get a little relief from the heat. They did this at a spot past a bridge, well beyond the renovation in progress, and they were having so much fun. The following week, a posted sign appeared in the access spot they’d been using. Really? Really, dude? Yes, really, and, technically, narrowly, my new neighbors had a right to post this narrow verge as their property, not open to all and sundry for swimming access. Swimming is an exaggeration as you can’t swim in the creek at that spot, but you can get wet, which is all those kids were doing.
This No Trespassing sign, however technically correct, was a schmucky thing to do. These kids were having fun, cooling off for a half hour or more, and, crucially, they didn’t leave anything behind, like garbage or wadded up tee-shirts. It’s a Catskills’ tradition that we live and let live, or try to. The new owners of this property have at least 1500 feet of direct stream access; these young people were not anywhere close to that, or near to a real, intrusive trespass of some kind; they were simply accessing the stream at a point of ease along a public road. A point of access, moreover, used by wildlife on a regular basis. Feh. Unneighborly.
Fast forward 3 weeks and another sign popped up, directly aimed at our heroine (me) and our hero (Diego). Oh my. Now they’ve really raised my Scots-Irish dander. What to do, what to do? Here’s the newest sign, which is yet another 15 – 20 feet beyond the original posted sign, and it is worth noting that on town roads, the verge is the property of the town, not the landowner as the town maintains it by cutting brush and repairing stream banks as needed among other duties of care:
The county in which I live is large – the approximate equivalent of the state of Rhode Island with a lot fewer people; there are 1.1 million Ocean Staters, to our 47K county residents. In other words, gentle readers, the place I live is very rural – and in this very rural place we let dog poop ‘sit’, unless it’s dropped on village streets or sidewalks, in village parks, or on local neighbors or anyone else’s lawn. We don’t have cities in this rural county, so that necessarily higher standard of respectful decency simply doesn’t apply.
Having had dogs in NYC, I can honestly say that not picking up dog shit daily is one of the small yet very pleasant perks of local life. Does it compensate for having to drive 45+ miles to see a flick, or a doc? Not really, but there are other wonderful perks of rural living that more than compensate.
All that said, this morning, Diego the Wonder Dog took a dump I swear could be seen from Mars. Was it near this officious persons supposedly owned verge? No. Did I let it lie? You bet I did. It wasn’t close to any human habitation, and was on the publicly owned verge, in uncut grass. And in future, will I walk along the grassy verge Mr. New-Big thinks he owns, wrinkling my nose in disgust at the sign he put up to alert me he’s doesn’t approve of my walking on a public, town road with my big-ass dog? You bet I will. Shit, after all, happens, dahlink. Being petty, mean and shitty, however, is a choice.