It’s going to be a glorious Christmas here on Long Island as we today experience a blizzard that almost guarantees there will be snow on the ground on Christmas Day!
To celebrate the first snowfall of the season, Danny and I bundled up in our winter coats, hats, and gloves, got the dogs on their leashes, and headed out into the white. At this point, there was just a dusting on the ground, but the wind was blowing hard and the snow was already blinding.
But not blinding enough to prevent us from being witness to what we were about to experience. We headed to the park at the end of our block—a wonderful little pond in the woods, surrounded by dirt paths and bridges that carry you over babbling brooks and streams. Very quaint, and a fantastic experience in the snow. Usually.
The first sign that this year’s first snowfall nature walk was going to be a disaster came at the end of our block. Danny is walking Sheffield up on the sidewalk instead of in the street as we normally do, and I see Sheffy, without missing a four legged stride, try to grab in his jowls a little mound that is lying on the snow. I squealed in horror as I swiftly detected it was a dead bird! Sheffy just as quickly detected my familiar ‘Sheffy! NO!’ dog whistle octave squeal of horror and loosened his jaws from around the frozen feathery carcass. I made a mental note not to accept any licks from Sheffy for the rest of the day.
We continued on our journey into the park. We entered one of the main paths that winds through the woods, and since there were no other people out and about, we decided to release the dogs from their leashes and let them run amok. They quickly ran way ahead of us to frolic in the snow together as they are prone to do, but as always, they stopped about 20 feet ahead and waited for us to catch up before running off again to repeat the sequence.
Eventually we arrived at a small trail that slices through the woods and is a shortcut to another main path. Danny asked if I wanted to cut through it, and I agreed, so we detoured, watching the dogs disappear into the frosted foliage in front of us. Eventually we caught up with the pups as the trail intersected with the main path. Once on it, Danny called the dogs over to give them treats for being such well behaved dogs and waiting for us. I’m not sure why, but for some reason, he removed one glove to adjust Miss Fine’s collar, which was askew.
As Miss Fine ran off to catch up with Sheffield, Danny says, “Call her back. There’s something on my hand. I think it might be blood.”
I quickly call her back, concerned and wondering how she managed to damage herself so badly during our little trip through the woods. But as she’s returning, Danny walks up to me and says he thinks he was wrong and it might just be mud. He shows me his fingers and, well, I didn’t exactly see the color of mud, nor the color of blood. What I saw was burnt sienna, the classic brownish-orange color from the Crayola 64 count box. I cringed a little and said, “Um…are you sure that’s mud?”
Danny quickly smells his finger, and mirrors my cringe face. By this point, Miss Fine had come back to us. Danny hurriedly rinsed his hand in the freezing cold, thin layer of snow on the path, smells his finger again (I’m making cringe face just recounting this) and now makes ‘smelly’ face. “I don’t think it’s mud,” he confesses in disgust.
He quickly examines Miss Fine, and there is this HUGE streak of burnt sienna all over her collar and the side of her neck. I lean in to smell it, and sure as shit, it’s…burnt sienna. I immediately blurted out, “It smells like horse sienna, not dog sienna.” Now don’t ask me how I am able to distinguish the difference, because I didn’t know I was able to either. It’s like I discovered I had a magical power at that very moment. My guess is that I simply detected the scent of hay somewhere in there…
See, these paths around the pond eventually lead to a horse ranch, so they are used as bridal paths. Thing is, we didn’t see any piles of horse poop in the snow as we were walking (or we surely would have stepped in them). All we could determine as we stood there in a growing blizzard with burnt sienna on Danny’s hand, Miss Fine’s collar, Miss Fine’s neck, and now the snow I was frantically trying to gather up to wash it off her neck, was that at some point in the dogs’ short bursts of distancing themselves from us, Miss Fine had discovered a fresh pile somewhere and simply WRIGGLED in it. I’ve seen her perform this very act on a horseshoe crab washed up on the beach, so I can tell she had a little cuddle session with the horse sienna. She’s out of view for five seconds and gets into a heap of trouble!!! Or should I say, a pile of trouble.
So much for a pleasant walk through the park during the first snowfall. Danny managed to rinse the burnt sienna off the collar in one of the streams, we got it back around Miss Fine’s burnt sienna stinking neck, and then we reattached both dogs’ leashes and got home as fast as we could…which wasn’t all that fast since we were now walking against 50 mile an hour winds!
Needless to say, Miss Fine barely had a chance to wipe her snowy paws on the welcome mat in our house before we threw her in the bathtub and gave her a nice thorough cleansing in hot water and honey oatmeal doggy shampoo. Unfortunately for Sheffy in this instance, we treat our dogs entirely as equals, so he had to suffer through a bath as well. I fleetingly considered washing his mouth out with honey oatmeal doggy shampoo, because despite the post-traumatic sienna I was experiencing, I hadn’t forgotten about the bird appetizer that had foreshadowed the coming storm during the blizzard.
Oh this made me laugh… not at you, but with you! Poor Sheffie… and poor Danny!