“Poop” … Just This Once

I don’t like the word “poop,” and I can’t say it without feeling ridiculous. It doesn’t sound serious enough and seems way too delicate. The stuff that I seem to spend my entire life cleaning up is … drumroll, please … dog shit.

I’ve had four back surgeries, and I would estimate that dog shit is responsible for four of my back surgeries. So while I’m sure no one is particularly crazy about it, I probably like it even less than most.

In California, where the weather is always annoyingly fine, we had double doors that led out to our property, which was fenced in. The doors were always open, so the dogs could go in and out easily. We never considered a “doggie door,” since ours would have had to be huge.

Of course, that did cause other problems. In the summer, the open doors let air-conditioning out and bugs in. In the winter, on a cold night, you could hang meat in our house.

So I came up with a solution, the only successful handyman-type idea I’ve ever had. We hung strips of clear plastic from the top of the open doors to the bottom, sort of like you would see in a car wash. The dogs could go in and out through the strips, which would then fall back into place. It certainly wasn’t perfect or airtight, but for someone who can’t change a lightbulb, it was inspired brilliance.

But the dog shit would accumulate outside, and the area required frequent maintenance. I was adept at using a dustpan and broom; Debbie is a maestro with a plastic bag. Once the shit is picked up, we hose down the entire area. It’s not fun, but not doing it is even less desirable.

Moving to Maine presented us with a bigger problem. It gets cold there, and snowy and muddy. If we used the open-door “car wash” approach, we would freeze to death.

Our contractor decided the solution was to build an extra room onto the house. The dogs would walk into that room through a doggie door, and then out through another one to the yard. The room would be the buffer, helping to keep out the cold from the main house, and bearing the brunt of the snow and mud as it was tracked in.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I didn’t want to have to build a “shit room.” It would have been ridiculously expensive, would have looked silly, and seemed wholly unnecessary.

So we tasked the contractor with finding or building a doggie door that would solve our problem. It had to be big enough for Wanda the mastiff to get through, which is to say we needed something roughly the size of the Lincoln Tunnel.

And they did it. If you ever find yourself in Maine, needing an enormous doggie door, just call Hervochon Construction. They rose to the occasion, on this and every other bizarre request we made.

Wanda has to duck only a little bit to go through the clear plastic, which immediately snaps back into place, with the benefit of magnets. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering.

Unfortunately, the stuff still has to be cleaned up. I’ve abandoned my dustpan and broom for a snow shovel, which I use year-round. But the job gets quite complicated in the winter, when the area is covered with snow and ice.

Not to get too technical for laypeople not involved in the shit removal business who might be reading this, but it’s a simple principle of physics. Shit stuck in ice tends to remain in ice until it melts. Before it melts, it’s impossible to remove. After it melts, I don’t want to get close enough to remove it.

It’s a dilemma.

Also, when it gets to the hosing-down-the-area part, which is essential to the process, the hose gets frozen in the winter, as do my face and hands.

Suffice it to say that it’s still a work in progress, but we unfortunately get a chance to practice our technique every winter’s day.