It’s going to be a long hot summer, I can see it already and it is only the first day. We live on the river and it is what one would call an attractive nuisance. Teen-age boys and dogs find it irresistible and the end result is bedlam for our house and yard. First, let’s take the boys. Who can blame them for swimming and exploring in the river especially on a hot humid day?

Yesterday was the first such day of the year and I came home to bedlam. My two grandsons along with their two dogs and our two dogs were cavorting in the river. The boys and one dog, our Dutch, were busy turning over rocks looking for crawfish. The other three dogs were alternating between the river and the woods, more concerned with red squirrels and chipmunks than crawfish.

It’s not easy writing a weekly column, particularly when you’re part of an exclusive group of cankerous old curmudgeons who critique your work.

I write for only two reasons. The first is so that my grandkids will know who I am someday after I am gone, even though they go out of their way not to read it today. The second is for all the old timers who have nothing to do and need something to complain about other than the government. I have tried to please the second group, whose members have expressed their disinterest in reading about dogs, but I can refrain no longer.

We have two dogs that are the bane of my life, especially in the summer. The summer has started, and the hot weather makes me irritable, and the dogs compound my irritability. I have lived with dogs my entire life. I love them and would find it hard to live without them. My father once described how he wanted me to act when I was growing up with my ninety plus great-grandfather as part of the household—to be seen and not heard—and at this stage of my life that’s the way I would prefer them to act. Ours are a far cry from acting that way.

They are big, loud, brash and messy in the extreme. We have one that goes out of the house at will from either door. He lifts the handle on the screen door and flings the patio door open with his nose if both are not locked. One problem is that he scratches the doors or barks to be let back in continuously. Another, more serious infraction, is when he charges out after a bear or visitors. I am concerned for him but not the bear. And for people who do not know he loves people but hates bears. He understands several words and reacts spontaneously and expressively whenever one of them is uttered. He does not spell yet but I fear he may learn. He loves kids to extremes. They do not answer any commands they have a mind not to, or as my father used to say, “they don’t listen very well.”

The four dogs breeds combined are two wire-haired griffons, a standard poodle and a beagle. The kid lover’s attention was firmly affixed on the activities of the crawfish fishermen while the other three were hard at work running down red squirrels and chippies.

Periodically, the hunts were interrupted by trips to the house by both dogs and kids for refreshments. A trail of wet footprints and muddy paw prints marking the way they came and went. Did I mention the grass clippings from the recently mowed lawn?

When the festivities finally conclude, you are left with plenty of evidence from the bedlam that reigned unabated for the last two hours. Guess who is left to right the carnage? Then you realize that it is only the beginning of at least two months of the same. It is hard to contemplate but like myriad other situations it helps to at least gripe about it and get it off your chest, so to speak.

So there you have it, you guys that want to hear no more about dogs. I know for a fact that most of you have had dogs all your life and it’s hard to believe you do not want to hear any more about them. You might not remember misery loves company, but I do.

Kids and dogs go together. They go together like liver and onions. It’s one of the reasons I have always had dogs. If they please the children, it pleases me, and if they encourage the grandkids to hang around, I’ll take them.

The thought for the week comes from one of history’s most famous authors, Rudyard Kipling: Brothers and sisters I bid you beware, of giving your heart to a dog to tear.