'mergency! 'mergency!

I'm in my forties and the smell of dog poop makes me nauseous. Want to know why? I didn't think so. I'll tell you anyway.

When I was in first grade, my dad was in Vietnam and we lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, two houses up from Uncle Buddy and Aunt Betty Jo and around the corner-ish from my grandmother Mimi and her sister Trudy. I was walking home from school and probably thinking about this girl in my class named Allison; our next-door neighbor Michael used to tease me and say she was my girlfriend. What can I say? I started young.

Anyway, I must have been thinking about something very distracting, because I stepped in a big ol' pile of dog poop in my front yard. Now everyone has, at one point or another in their lives, stepped in dog poop, so you know that, first of all, it's the most disgusting smell in the world before you step in it (I know, this is gross, but hang in there), but after?! That's when the real smell hits you! Don't deny it; you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now that's bad enough, but it really gets bad when...

You fall down and smack the smelly spread-out pile with your hand.

To this day, the smell of dog poop makes me almost throw up. The other day my sister Lauren and I took her family's lab Kobe out for a walk. Now when I walk Kobe, I head quickly to any area that is off the sidewalk, off the path, in the bushes somewhere, so that when he does his business, I can kick some dirt over it and no one will be the wiser. However, if he goes in someone's yard, or somewhere in plain sight, I'll clean it up, of course, but not before I pull my shirt up over my nose and hold my breath. Even though that day Lauren cleaned it up and I maintained a safe distance - upwind - of at least ten feet, I still do the field-expedient (Army talk) protective mask thing and pull my shirt up over my nose, even at the risk of looking like a dork and having my sister laugh at me.

This is such a joke in my family, that one year at the beach (our extended family and that of my brother-in-law Steve go to Oak Island, North Carolina every year in July), when my nephew Connor was still in diapers, I volunteered to take him inside and change him. Connor (thank you, Connor), to his credit, didn't smell like a dog, pardon the bad kind-of-pun comment. And I did cover my nose with my shirt. And you can be damn sure I took that diaper back to the beach with us and showed Lauren and my mom; I was proud of myself - I didn't even gag!

I guess when you step in dog poop at an early age, and fall down and get it all over your hand, and throw up three times before you make it to the front door, and run inside screaming "Mommy! Mommy! 'mergency!
'mergency!", and are so traumatized that even as an adult you need to cover your nose when you come anywhere close to dog poop, then successfully changing dirty diapers is a triumph. I may not act my age sometimes, but at least I'm maturing.