A Poo-purseful Walk

Due to my current unemployed status, Flounder and I have been taking lots of walks lately.  It's nice that we live in wooded area with paved trails and even a trail along the cliffside overlooking the ocean. We have a regular house, with a small yard where Flounder is let out to relieve himself as he needs.  He's never been a dog who has to go outside constantly, twice a day and he's good.  Lately, however, that has not been good enough.

It's a couple minute walk to get our mail so I usually take Flounder on this daily trip over to the communal box.  I grab the mailbox key and his leash as he does his happy dance.  Just the slightest suggestion that we might be going outside excites Flounder.  Then he gives me the look, the one that says "grab a bag lady, maybe two even" and I hunt around for a plastic poo picker upper bag.  Why has my daily "get a little exercise and nature" stroll turned into turd duty?  Yes, I said doody, snicker. . .  Is it the suggestion of other dogs that turns his bowels a churning?  Almost every trailhead of this HOA has the bag boxes & a garbage can.  I think Flounder is beginning to recognize what that squatting dog picture means he just doesn't realize it's for pet owners convenience, not a requirement. Think of it as a Suggested Speed Sign as you go around a corner, not a Stop Sign you have to obey.

So off we go . . . am I looking at birds and squirrels scampering, or listening to the roar of the ocean and the clang of the whistle buoy?  No, I'm eyeing a bulging rectum wondering when it's going to drop and I hope we'll be near a garbage can when it does.  When it finally does, I turn that baggy inside out, stick my hand in and grab those warm gooshy poo-goobers.  Ahh, the joys of being a dog owner.  Who's really in charge here . . . .

My Inner Child is a Mermaid

I’ve always been drawn to water, it’s my happy place.  I was born in Seattle, my maternal family are long time Washingtonian fisherman, and 20 years of my life was spent growing up on the shores of the Hood Canal and Puget Sound.  Now, after 14 years of living in high desert climes I have returned to my beloved.  Newly 40, newly engaged and newly unemployed, I quit my job, gathered my teenage daughter, college-age son and aging mother to follow my fiancé who was offered a job transfer to the Oregon coast.

All this newfound free time has given me ample opportunity to mind-wander.  I wonder if ocean fascination is particular to those of us in the west.  Do people in Kansas dream of dipping their toes in this great sea too?  I could spend hours watching the ocean waves crash against the rocks, eddying between boulders, or just quietly ebbing & flowing with the tides.  There is such a pull that I think it must be primordial.  Is it because we evolved from ocean dwelling creatures and that salty water still circulates in our blood?  Or is it not so far back, remembering our time in the womb and living (and breathing!) in this watery cocoon.  My new status – as an unemployed (almost) housewife after years of being single and fiercely independent has caused me to re-evaluate my role in my house as well as the greater society.  Mother nature, mother earth . . . why do we feminize these things, is it fickleness of weather, power of storms, cyclic-ness of seasons that remind of us of the women in our life?  Is it a compliment or an insult? 

In the past, it was believed that a women’s cycle corresponded with the moon’s cycle with ovulation at the full moon and menses at the new moon.  Now that we are not dependent on natural light and nature’s bounty, have we become out of tune? “Normal” menstrual cycles are based on lunar months of 28 days, the same lunar cycles that regulate the tides.  Can we blame our shift towards man-made everything for irregularity?  I’m not a hippie-granola-non deodorant wearing-hairy armpits-earth mother by any means, but maybe we’ve come too far from our origins.  Something to ponder?

“When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused."
- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

"It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea--whether it is to sail or to watch it--we are going back from whence we came."
- John F. Kennedy