Yesterday it rained. It honest-to-goodness rained! Water fell from the sky, and things got wet and the water kept falling and things stayed wet all day. I was a year old and already a man-dog the first time I saw rain, and that first time I barked at it because I didn’t know what it was. Now I’m good at rain and can tell the difference between rain and sprinklers so I don’t bark at the rain like I bark at the sprinklers. Mom, I guess is not so good at rain because yesterday she didn’t know about weather reports, or that she’s not supposed to wear the same clothes in the rain. She also apparently doesn’t know that wood gets super slippery in the rain. She came home filthy, bloody and grumpy after hitting the deck TWICE on wet wooden bridges while she rode her bike home. She told me that she was mad at My Trail, and she didn’t trust me not to pull her on the slippery bridges and that we had to run in the Wetlands that Smell Like a Fart instead. That was fine by me, because the Wetlands smell extra fart-y after the rain lets all the fart-stink out of the ground.
The rain had stopped overnight and it was humid and sunny, which made yesterday’s rain come out of the ground in a thick, visible fart-cloud that stuck close to the trail. At first the fart-cloud was fun to look at, because we were just a little bit above it. But as we ran back we had to run for 3 miles straight through the wispy fart-cloud. The sun was shining directly ahead, and it lit up the whole fart till it looked like we were inside a light bulb and we couldn’t see a thing for the glare. To make matters worse, the silty top layer of the trail had turned into a slippery clay-like mud. I didn’t like how the mud got stuck between my toes, and I kept breaking stride to try to shake it off. I tried running behind Mom so that she could figure out where the trail was, but big clumps of mud kept flying off the bottom of her shoes and hitting me in the face. At one point I said, “Oh shoot, the trial’s over there!” and suddenly turned 45 degrees across Mom’s path. Mom screamed because the mud was just as slippery as the wet wood yesterday. She slipped just like yesterday and thought she was going to fall down and get mud in her elbow scabs. Humans seem strangely afraid of dirty, stinky things. When I find a dirty, stinky thing all I want to do is roll around in it, but well… Moms are strange beasts.
–Oscar the Pooch
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