As someone once said, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy. Or something like that. And so this is the view I bring to that site so familiar to those of us who live and work in urban places: the man or woman walking their dog while wearing a plastic bag on their hand like a mitten. You know what that is for.
It seems to me you shouldn't own a dog unless you have a back door that you can let the dog burst out of in the morning, and the door opens onto a space at the end of which the dog can charge across the tenuous boundary between lawn and field and keep on going -- dodging and chasing whatever scents remain from last night's possums and raccoons and deer and, yes, to take a dump any old place he happens to be when the spirit moves him. So to speak.
Meanwhile, you are standing in the open doorway, or even better on a porch, drinking the cool morning air, thinking of your old neighbor back in Cambridge, the woman who walked her two little dogs on short leashes -- dogs that didn't walk so much as whirl around her feet like wind-blown leaves. She is even older now, and probably reduced to cats.
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