What to write about, what to write about…

fenceI’d’ve rather inserted an image of Gretchen-the-dog here but she was POOPING and I didn’t think anyone would want to look at that. Oops, she was pooping in the woods. Should I have reported her? It’s on school property. I think. Once upon a time when I still knew people at the school behind my house, that school put up new gates on the woods and tried to padlock it shut. Saaaaay what? I emailed Jacqui on the Haisley PTO to express my dismay that I could not walk in the woods behind my house. She took it to the Haisley principal who said that there was “a lot of science going on in those woods” and the kiddos might get dog poop on their feet… And bring it into the school…

In the first place… This occurred in the next year or so after I left my career as Haisley PTO Treasurer (because my kids moved on, not because I mismanaged the funds, just saying). I spent that career managing a slush fund of epic proportions for an elementary school. I could not for the life of me get people to spend it. So my first thought about that principal’s response was something like, “Why don’t you buy a pair of rubber boots for every kid in the school and hose them down when they come back inside after all of those trips (not) into the woods to look for all that “science”. I was working from home in those years and I think maybe once I saw a classroom of kids walking through the woods looking at the blasted “science”.

That principal sounded like a total idiot but in reply, I mentioned that a lot of Wild Aminals (raccoons, possums, birds, feral cats, ground hogs, scurry mice to name only a few) also poop in the woods and that I walked through there daily and never encountered poop of any kind, including dog poop. The principal relented and unlocked the woods.

A few things… Gretchen was not pooping on the Trail today. It looked like that was HER choice. Her human was standing 10 yards away doing stuff with his iPhone. I think that dogs poop on sidewalks (or on the lawns next to them) because people walk them on sidewalks (next to lawns) and there is nowhere else to poop. I have walked a few dogz in that woods over the years. Bandit, Ernie, and Alfred. I would always let them run free and if they pooped (and I don’t know if they did but prob’ly), it was not where people walked.

And then there’s the issue of trees falling on the fence and destroying the entrance to the woods. The HUGE tree that fell back on December 28th was not the first tree to destroy the entrance to the north side of the woods. It just made it worse. I kinda wanta bug the school district about this difficult entrance to the northern half of Ritsema Woods (Louise Ritsema is probably churning in her grave). On the other hand, why do we separate the woods from our school (and those homes — mine — that back up to it) by chainlink fences?

Wouldn’t it be better to get rid of the fences?

2 Responses to “What to write about, what to write about…”

  1. Margaret Says:

    I think fences are a terrible idea. I wish we had never built any; of course, part of that is that my fence is 20 years old and starting to need repair. Patt loved the privacy of a fence and we had a dog at the time, so we needed it. However, if I had to do it now, I wouldn’t.

  2. jane Says:

    Free the Woods!