I can’t recall ever living in a place without a canine or two as part of the family.  In fact, I believe a house without at least one dog wandering the rooms is not living up to its potential for being “home.”

The years go by, faster all the time, and I find myself becoming melancholy as I see, in my tail-wagging friends, the subtle signs of aging. The playfulness remains, but for shorter periods. The coats get a bit more grey, the teeth a bit more yellow.

I just sat here and watched my little girl Boston Terrier walk incredibly slowly up some stairs. It was geriatric pace, almost surreal. This is a 15-pound dog with bulging thighs. She loves to flatten her large ears against her neck, get real close to the ground and explode with uncanny speed. But there she was, dragging her butt upstairs, one … step … at … a … time, almost as if she were using a walker.

To be fair, this dog is not normal. She does very strange, non-doglike, things all the time. She thinks a lot. She clearly sits and ponders. So maybe she was just deep in thought as she climbed the stairs.

A Box of Crumpled Paper and Pure Love

The good news is the dogs in this house haven’t allowed aging to diminish their senses of humor. And the really good thing about dog senses of humor is that the dogs don’t even know they have senses of humor. I’m assuming they don’t, of course, just as I assume they don’t realize how perfect they are at practicing unquestioning, unconditional love every time I walk through the front door.

Tonight found the male of the duo standing bolt upright inside a big, orange wheelbarrow being pushed around the yard by my son. The bulging Boston Terrier eyes showed no sign of distress as the lovable creature “stood at the helm” of the bouncing vehicle. I never have a camera when I need one.

The impact on a family that good dogs can have should not be discounted. When the subject of tattoos came up the other day, my kid said he someday was going to get inked with an image of his wheelbarrow-riding best friend. If he’d said he wanted a tat of anything else, I would have bristled. But I know his love for this dog, and I just nodded. I couldn’t think of any reason to dissuade him.

Not everything about aging is so bad.

I’m not talking about the house here. The subject is me, and I’ll cut right to the chase. One thing about aging that’s not so bad is the way you don’t get grossed-out by things in nature that send your children right off the edge. For example, I can hold a stinkbug (and why the hell am I still dealing with inside-my-house stinkbugs in February?) right in my hand and not feel even a pang of uneasiness.

I’d like to see my kid do that. I can also unflinchingly clean dog puke, repair broken septic leach field pipes and reach bare-handed into gutters caked with rotting leaves. Pieces of cake. (How’s that for inappropriate?)

This struck me today when I was about to burn a piece of wood that was nearly covered with fungi. I brought the log up to the house earlier in the day. It was among a small pile of split wood at the bottom of the property, a pile made about two years ago. The wood in the pile wasn’t rotted, but to say it was seasoned would be an understatement.

Fungus Among Us

When I put the log in question into the back of the truck, I only gave passing attention to its coat of fungi. It wasn’t until I had the thing in my arms and was heading to the wood-stove tonight that I really took a good look at it and quickly came to appreciate its beauty.

There was no way I was going to burn what, to my eye, was a piece of natural art.

Fun with Fungi

In fact, I headed for my camera and took a half-dozen photos. Far from being grossed-out, I was totally engrossed. I can’t say the same for my boy. He seemed to suffer a deeply-felt aversion to the creepy log.

He didn’t even want to look at it and I think he was incredibly upset that he’d brought it into the house, having gathered it at night when he couldn’t see its fungal adornments. He’d been tricked by darkness into holding something he now didn’t want in the same room.

“Just burn it!” he begged, adding some bogus assertion that the poor log was a bio-hazard.

Sorry kid. Ain’t gonna happen.

Some of the holes I dug in our yard were to plant live Christmas trees. Buying live trees seemed a good idea and the one we planted in front of the house is now at least 20 feet tall. Unfortunately, two others didn’t fare as well. While they were fairly alive when Santa came, they were less so by the time they reached their backyard destinations. On the bright side, their skeletons now support thriving berry bushes.

Once I start digging in the yard, I always wonder how deep I need to go to find Indian stuff. I figure at least a few Lenape passed over, hunted or otherwise visited this spot in 12,000 years before being ousted by the Europeans. Did they bury dogs here too? I sometimes unearth clamshells, but they’re probably from garbage-burying 20th Century owners and not the bounty of ancient Indian expeditions to the Sandy Hook.

We have a good-sized backyard, but it’s almost useless for burying pets. There are obstructions to deep digging. The best place to inter bigger animals is a patch next to the house. It has good dirt but it’s small. Nevertheless, I was amazed during a cat funeral when my shovel revealed a plastic bag containing a feline buried years earlier. Can’t remember if I double-stacked them, but that would’ve been sensible.

I’m bound to this old money-pit. It’s creaky and crooked. It needs expensive repairs. So what’s the draw? Well, aside from raising a family here, we’ve buried in the yard four good-natured dogs. When mowing, I sometimes think about their bones below me. I remember how a couple followed the tractor as it went around and how old Guinness, the sweetest Doberman ever, would move sticks out of my way if I asked. They seemed happy to be here with us.