Last night where I live, it dumped buckets of snow. Then, in the morning, it dumped buckets of rain. Just as yellow and blue make green, so too do snow and rain make slowly receding slush. My wife and I took the dog out & slogged around much less far than we had intended to, as all three of us got drenched and freezing and desirous of a return to residential heating.
Those piles of slush had looked so placid and inviting. Clearly, the sky has it in for us.
In any event, when we got in, I peeled the dog's soaked coat off of it (Yes, the dog has a coat. It's a short-haired breed with no undercoat, but besides that, we are clearly the kind of dog owners who want to embarrass our dog.), and balled up the coat and leash to toss on the kitchen counter.
My wife threw up her hands in exasperation, wiped down the counters with antiseptic while wondering aloud how I never died of food poisoning while a bachelor, and said I should have beelined to the bathroom with these things, to drip dry in the shower. She then disappeared with them, apparently off to prepare for her day, where there were not people throwing dirty things onto clean.
The dog and I stood dripping and blinking at each other in the mud room. I then shrugged, grabbed a towel to dry it off, fed it breakfast and we went about our day, too.
I came home a few hours later to walk and feed the dog, only for its coat and leash to be found… nowhere. I looked where we normally keep them. I looked where we don't normally keep them, but where I may have seen them once or twice before. I looked where I've had dreams of them being. I looked where I had never conceived of them being. Nothing.
It was getting late, and the dog was looking at me like, "What is this game you're playing? The rules make no sense. Oh, and I gotta pee…". So I let it out to gingerly pick through the slush and do its business, while I prepared lunch. Texted my wife to ask her where the doggie gear was.
The dog came in, ate its lunch. Played a bit with its bone, gamely ran when chased, chased when I stole its bone. When things calmed down, it looked at me like, "I'm not sure why we're not on schedule, but at least you're worth staring at for a while." The dog does that a lot, in lieu of anything better to do. It's a bit unnerving, in the evolutionary that-wolf-thing-staring-at-me-could-rip-out-my-larynx-if-such-a-thought-ever-crossed-its-furry-mind manner, but also incredibly endearing in the "You've done so very much for me in my short, cute life. I wonder what you are going to do now?" way.
When the fun of staring at me was complete (I think the dog is usually fairly generous in this regard: I don't find myself particularly engrossing to stare at.), it then rang the bell to go back outside. I had hoped it had meant to finish doing its business, but it was instead fascinated with the now more quickly melting slush. Prancing around and munching, batting at it and leaving cute little paw prints all over the yard, just to see how much area it could claim in a medium other than pee. That was some fun, at least… even though the poor dog was shivering its little tail off.
It was getting late, and my wife wasn't getting back to me.
Well, at least the dog had gotten in a good play, if not a good walk. Oh well. So while I went to go do my business prior to leaving back to work, I passed the shower in the bathroom. The shower, that held…
The coat and the leash. Where my wife had told me to put them.
At the same moment, I received a text from her telling me where they were. And then another, apologizing that it was probably too late for me to use that information to actually walk the dog.
Now, she hadn't earlier expressly told me that she was putting them in the shower, but she had disappeared into another room with them, just after telling me I should have done so.
Something tells me I'm going to have to work on the whole "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" thing. Soon, I'll have more than the dog's mind to compete with: there will also be a baby's mental development to measure up against. Hmm…
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