It’s morning, I’m late, as usual, and hopping around trying to brush my shoes and tie my teeth and round up the books I need to return to the library (where I work) when I notice something. A noise. Something drumming softly in another room. It’s an odd noise, and out of place in my morning routine. It sounds like...water running, no, splattering.
I cock my head trying to place the location of the noise. I creep from doorway to doorway and follow the sound into the dining room. Liquid is splashing onto the dining room table. From the table it bounces up and flies in thousands of tiny droplets out into the room, spraying the floor, the walls, the piano, me. My eyes follow the stream of liquid up, up, up to the ceiling where it is pouring through the exposed lath. My brain is exceedingly slow to puzzle this out. Why is there liquid up there? Above this area of the dining room, there is only the hallway and my bedroom door. No plumbing. No pipes.
A dog brushes against my legs. A lightbulb goes off in my head – it’s one of those jarring, noisy warning bulbs that lights up and honks when nuclear power plant protocol has been breached. Wonk! Wonk! Wonk!
I race up the stairs, all six dogs scrambling up with me, bumping into me, nearly knocking me all the way down the stairs again. I turn the corner at the hallway and slide to a stop in front of my bedroom door. Where there is a rapidly disappearing pool of dog pee. Rapidly disappearing because it is draining through the cracks of the old wood floor and through the broken plaster and exposed lath of the dining room ceiling and onto the dining room table (did I mention that this is a dining room table – people eat food from this table!)
Cursing at the dogs, I slosh a mop through the mess and finish it off with a towel – a towel, I might add, that I had just laundered the night before. A clean towel that has been folded on the bathroom shelf for a mere 8 hours, before being used to wipe up dog piss.
Downstairs (where each dog is now cowering in its own corner, trying to look small and vulnerable and innocent), I rapidly clean up the table, chairs, floor, piano, then realize I need to change my clothes as well. I am late for work.
This is my morning. This is not an unusual morning.
I have six dogs, obviously untrained, and every morning when I wake up I have six dogs with full bladders. My own bladder is also full. I used to drag myself out of bed and to the back door to let dogs out to pee before I had used the bathroom myself. But since our yard is not fenced, and there is a leash law, I can only let one dog out at a time. Have you ever watched a dog choose a spot to pee? They can be interminably slow. Sniff the rock, hmm, no, maybe the garbage can, hmm, no, not there, oh, a stick of wood. Nope. “Just go potty, damn you!” I yell, startling some early morning joggers passing by the house. Times that by six, and you can see my problem. After I’d peed in my pajamas a few times, I made an executive decision: the one who buys the dog food gets to pee first.
But a dog whose bladder has been filling up all night long is a worried dog and an anxious dog. There are mornings I can hear the dogs milling about outside the bathroom door, almost hear their fretting, almost see them squeezing their furry legs together, pinching their doggy lips together in an attempt to tighten all bodily sphincter muscles. Some mornings, such as this one, somebody failed. Or, I suspect, somebody didn’t try hard enough.
My life is clearly out of control. I am not living up to my potential. And I am late to work again, thinking, how did I get here? Why do I have so many dogs? Why are there holes in my ceiling? How do I sanitize the dining room table? How do I get the odor of dog pee out of my unfinished wood floors? And how do I escape?? But then I arrive at work, and must think about other things, like earning enough money to feed my dogs, repair my ceiling, buy a new table, finish my floors and book a one way ticket to Tahiti.
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