A dog with a blog
My New Trail starts in the neighborhood where the ocean lives. I paid extra attention to signs of what kind of neighborhood it was as I patrolled my new turf and surf. The ocean must not be a good neighbor, because it had worn the paint off of any house that wasn't paying attention, and wherever there was metal it had tagged it up with bubbles of rust.
Our stuck house is very small, only about the size of a hotel room, but Mom insisted on keeping her big dreadmill inside it. That’s called “priorities.”
He stopped so we could pass, and I shouted, "HEY, YOU TWO BIG-MOUTHED FIDDLEHEADS!" I barked at them. "THIS COUNTY PARK AIN'T BIG ENOUGH FOR THE TWO OF US!" I had no idea if that was true, but since Mom had brought a real authentic-looking cowboy hat for me to wear today, talking with old west sass was fun.
Every year the mom-soon season overstays its welcome, and when we complain about all the rain and ruined hikes, dimwits who never play outside and get all their weather information from the internet say, "But we need the rain! It's a drought."
Others looked like they had lost a bet with Home Depot and had to wear all of the mismatched parts that no one wanted. On this side of the channel, away from Legoland, the landscape didn't follow any instruction book. The flowers bloomed in sloppy disorder, there was no sidewalk to walk on, and puddles took over the bare earth. "Mom, I can't tell if this is pretty, or not pretty," I said.
Yesterday I had a meeting with a bunch of collies, but Saturday meetings are different from the meetings that we have during the work week. First of all, you don't have to meet at the office and you can go somewhere more interesting than a conference room. When Mom let me out of the car yesterday, I saw a man and a dog waiting for me at the spot where the road ended and the woods began. When I got closer I could see that it was one of my collies, but I didn't know the dog.
It didn't really matter where I ran because everywhere was basically the same, so I ran everywhere to see what the sand looked like when I looked uphill at it, and downhill at it, and while at full speed, and close up at the end of my nose, and upside-down while rolling around on my back.
The trail was still sweating off the month of rain in streams that dug a tiny canyon down the middle of the trail, and sometimes pooled into big patches of mud that I leapt over and Mom had to tip-toe through.
Mom and I have never been so badly matched as dance partners, so there are only so many places where Mom can walk with her elderly meatwad shuffle and I can frolic like a light-footed freight train. But I'm so starved for sprinting that even the old familiar places are exciting. When I smelled the beach coming, I whimpered a happy song and crawled up to the copilot's seat to look out the front window for all the dogs just waiting for me to chase them around in the sand.