HanktheDog Blog

A lot of humans think there are no seasons in Florida but the dogs here know there are plenty. There's tourist season, for example, when Mike finds it hard to locate parking at the beach and red-skinned Canadians mutter under their breath at Labradors galumphing about in their native habitat. Or there's football season, which many a dog finds loud and alarming, with humans spewing strong emotions for unfathamable reasons at unpredictable times.

There's also hurricane season, with all the attendant human anxiety and board cutting and storm tracking. And there's mango season, when Molly refuses to go in the backyard (she's allergic), Mike curses the local fruit rats, and neighbors we didn't know we suddenly show up on the stoop with grocery bags in hand. (I get some serious barking done this time of year).

But maybe the best time of year is springtime around the lake. The humidity doesn't yet make a thick-coated dog feel as if he's wallowing through a curtain of heat, lightning doesn't daily threaten an instant electric death, the lake water is still cool enough to enliven Labradors and, best of all, there's still the scent of green hope sending its undaunted tendrils into the harsh, stifling future of the coming tropical months.

The signs are plain all around the glorified retention pond that is my lake. In the still, clear water, you can see the circular bass nests throughout the shallows. These little craters are sewn with the seed of hot-blooded fish. The males chase each other out of one another's territories, guarding the nests as jealously as a dog does his porch. There are eggs there, I know, thousands of gooey little globes biding their time.

Life begins this way for all creatures, of course. On one side of the lake, the dumbest of domesticated white ducks - the kind I chase with a kind of disdain - has built a nest and laid her eggs nearly out in the open, next to a willow tree and green bench. And the cannier, wilder gullinule has built a nest down at the level of the water, one much harder to detect.

It's obvious, even to a Labrador, that the future has many enemies. There are sharp-beaked birds in the trees that attack the duck eggs, and there are little skate-boarding boys who've molested the gallinule eggs. I myself have stirred up the waters around some of the bass nests, to Molly's chagrin.

It's astonishing that life carries on at all. You, dear reader, are part of an unbroken chain of births dating back billions of years, if the human scientists are to be believed. Not once have your countless ancestors stumbled. Your forebears, and mine, were always the eggs that survived, the young that went uneaten, the babies that didn't perish in a precarious world. In other words, you and I are the longest of longest shots, the fruit of odds so long that they make your average lottery look like a sure bet. We are the inheritors of this impossible springtime. Today, I just want to prance through the green with a bough in my jaws and breath it all in.