The first thaw

Tonight the dogs had their first satisfying walk in a month.

The warmer temperatures in the past two days have thawed the sheets of ice that lay on top of the grass, the sidewalks and the street, which had transformed everything into a large and perilous ice rink. The all-pervasive freeze made it impossible for the dogs to edge close to the light posts and sign posts and the hedges and the sides of trash cans where dogs leave their secret messages for each other.

During the freeze, Geni (short for Genevieve, like the French girl Madeleine's mutt dog) was particularly confused by all the sameness and the whiteness around her, uncharacteristically and un-demurely choosing to relieve herself right in the middle of the path we walked, rather than try to figure out where the erstwhile grass had been.

Rusty, for his part, was bored and befuddled by the lack of smells and textures and colors that he loves to dwell on, making our walks in warm weather more like stops during which he ponders the meaning of every blade of grass or limb of bush where another dog has peed.

That we had a walk at night at all was a thrill for the two transplanted Puerto Rican satos, whose telenovela story I'll tell in full some other night. Because of the Plutonian cold of the last month, and because my husband has been recovering from knee surgery, we gave up on walking them nightly as we always did. When we stopped the night walks, both of them were clearly disappointed but hopeful that it as a temporary interruption in their routine. As they realized that this was no passing change but rather a more permanent hiatus in their exercise schedule, they both started getting that big-eyed what-a-downer look that under-stimulated dogs tend to get.

Tonight, then, was quite the treat. They were both smelling and grunting and panting and rushing from bush to bush and post to post and trash can to trash can, updating every other dog to come on their own dearth of adventures for the past month and getting their paws all muddied and wet as they climbed on grassy banks and sidled over to the hedges that they had been unable to smell or mark for weeks.

Their delight, as often happens with the pure perfume-like distilled happiness of dogs, was contagious and it provided me with my first taste of the fun of spring to come.