Until yesterday, we had a 100% record of cleaning up Sammy and Lola’s poops.

Here’s the story. I was walking Lola in the park, very early in the morning. As I watched her squat down into position, I realized that I was without bags.

Oh, crap. Literally.

I was amazed (but pleasantly surprised) to discover that there were no random plastic bags littering the park. So, I had to leave the poop behind.

I felt so guilty about it for the rest of our walk. Then, to my astonishment, Lola squatted down again and did a second poop. Oh, man. It was still before 6:00 a.m. There were no other dog walkers from whom I could borrow a bag. And now there were two mounds of dog poop littering the park.

When I got home, I asked my husband to go to the park and retrieve the poop. No surprise, he said he’d do it but didn’t. I fretted about the poops for the rest of the day. So later that night, we walked with the dogs back to the park and searched for the poop. We agreed that we would pick up Lola’s Poop #1 because Poop #2 was too far away.

As we walked in the dark and cold and I tried my best to remember exactly where she had squatted earlier that morning. We were getting frustrated and I started to question whether the effort was really worth it. I mean, the dogs poop 5 times a day! Missing two poops out of over 1,800 isn’t bad!

As we scanned the frozen ground, and walked around in circles, Sammy came to a full stop and refused to move forward. He does this sometimes when he smells food or a good pee-pee spot, but we were on a mission to find Lola’s poop and we didn’t have the patient to wait for him.

I tugged at his leash but he refused to budge. I called out to him in frustration and as the words were leaving my mouth, I saw that he was sniffing a mound of poo. Lola’s poo! Sammy had found it!

I was so relieved.

There’s still one more poo out there, somewhere near the Drum Circle in Prospect Park. Sammy “Shitlock Holmes” Sanchez and I will seek it out over the weekend.