The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Over on the other side of the island I have a little 5 acre park I caretake, mostly mow the grass, weed eat the ditches, chainsaw up the trees that fall over the trails and pick up trash my visitors are kind enough to leave behind. It’s a thankless job but I figure it’s the only park on the South End, one that nobody else volunteers to help maintain, so somebody ought to step up and if that someone is me year after year, so be it.

The other day I was sprucing up the picnic grounds and found a little baggie of dogshit considerately left on the table for someone else to dispose of, but not the dog’s owner, apparently. Giving credit where credit is due, at least my visitor, no doubt ‘woke’ enough to scoop the poop and bag it, cleans up after her/his pup. But what I always wonder when I find the baggie tied and left behind is whether they/them/it understands the principle behind scooping. I’d prefer they/we/us just shoveled the crap into the woods where it could compost naturally somewhere no one would walk on it or smell it, but to encase it in a plastic bag and leave it on the picnic table, somehow that seems, oh, I don’t know, inconsiderate unless the leaver is mentally challenged by the concept of scooping and bagging.

I could leave an instructional sign up, I suppose, although I’m not wanting to man/womansplain to the folks who walk their dogs there how the process is supposed to work. Seems obvious to me. Too obvious to explain. But there are folks out there who definitely could use a manual. A few years back the South End String Band decided to set up an impromptu concert on one of the hills at Terry’s Corner, this being before Freedom Park was imagined. Fools on the Hill, we called it that day. Eventually a woman drove in and we thought, well, here’s the first of what would be a gathering audience.

She got out of her car, attached a leash to her german shepard and proceeded to walk the path up the hill to where we were playing Cripple Creek. About toward the finale she came up beside us and the mutt took his dump next to our bass player, then the woman turned and headed back to her car. A lesser band might have called out, hey, you forgot something, lady! But instead we shook our collective heads, finished the song and then laughed until we cried. Critics, I guess, come in all breeds. I wonder, though, if that same woman is the one who leaves the bagged poop for me/you/or them. Maybe doesn’t like the way we maintain her park…..

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