I'm being rebellious right now! (Don't tell my husband...opps, he will read this!) I can't afford this time to write, but I must...it is all welling up inside of me, threatening to burst. It must be Spring Fever! Spring is a tenuous thing here in Colorado, whispering its siren song for a few days, then shyly receding back into its cave when Old Man Winter asserts his authority once again. Another snow dump is in the forecast, but for this moment Spring is still summoning me.

I think my dogs feel it too. And rebellion is their response as well. They have all become knuckleheads who don't listen to me, wander off obliviously sniffing down a scent and are completely intoxicated with all the new life happening around them. Neither of us wants to be rebellious. It's not a choice to defy those we love, but rather our inner voice drowning out all sense of responsibility and awareness of the call from others. I must remember this as I bellow out their names to no avail and wonder what's gotten into them. Truth be told, it's gotten into me too!

But another factor in their abandon to Spring's call is the emerging fish...emerging from the frozen ice pond in our Adventure Land. Fish-pops just theirs for the taking! And believe me, they are taking them! First they roll in them to perfume their bodies with this scaly aphrodisiac, then they fight over who gets to carry the prized possession. God knows (literally, since He must have put this instinct in them!) why they want to smell like a dead, rotting fish, but they do. All of them...and even more so as they see others vying for aromatic advantage. And surprisingly, the females seem even more desperate in their rolling and squirming to get the maximum effect from their cosmetic efforts. (Sound familiar?!) I asked a dog afficiado why they do this and he said it masks their own natural scent with something their potential prey doesn't recognize as a predator. Hello, domesticated dogs, that's why we invented canned dog food...get the memo! It surely isn't a survival advantage being stinky in our pristine homes...just means an unwanted trip to the bathtub at the mercy of an owner who is anything but gentle in removing the revolting smell.

Perhaps the life lesson is that times change...and we need to change with them. What was advantageous at one point in our life might not be now. Perhaps new needs require new solutions. Perhaps just following the crowd to a stinky fish isn't the end all. Perhaps being true to the "scent" God wove in us is the best aroma we could ever conjure up. Perhaps we need to cut others (and ourselves) some slack as Spring Fever seduces us to knuckleheadedness. In all of this Spring-inspired wisdom, I must secretly confess I am deeply hurt that my animal magnetism can't compete with a smelly fish!