There is one morning every September where the ground gives under your boot in a way it has not given since March, and you know. Not from the forecast. From your foot.
The mud is back.
Your dog worked this out about four days before you did. That is why they have been standing at the door with that particular expression, the one that means something has changed outside and you are being unreasonably slow about it.
You had a good summer. Everyone did. There were the long light evenings and the walk at eight when it was still warm, and the paddling pool, and the weeks where the dog came home dusty rather than filthy and you had genuinely forgotten what the hallway looks like in November. There was a whole season where a walk was just a walk and not a small logistical operation involving towels.
That is over now. It ended on a Tuesday and nobody announced it.
The first field
You know the field. Everyone has one. It is the one at the bottom of the route that holds water, the one that is fine all summer and then, from about the second week of September, becomes a completely different landscape.
You stand at the gate. You do the calculation. There is a longer way round on the path, which adds eight minutes and keeps everybody clean.
The dog is already through the gate.
They do not do the calculation. They have never once done the calculation. To them the field has simply improved. It smells more interesting, it is softer to run on, it holds the tracks of everything that came through it in the night, and there is a puddle at the far end that was not there in August and is, apparently, the best thing that has happened to anyone all year.
You watch a perfectly clean dog become a completely different colour in about eleven seconds. There is a moment mid-sprint where all four legs leave the ground and you think, with total clarity, that you would not undo this if you could.
What the mud is actually for
Here is the thing nobody tells you when you get a dog, and which takes a couple of winters to understand.
The mud is not the price of the walk. It is quite a lot of the walk.
All summer your dog was managing heat. Panting on the pavement, finding the shade, lying flat on the coolest tile in the kitchen at two in the afternoon. Summer is beautiful and summer is also, for a dog in a fur coat, a season of quiet effort.
And then the temperature drops eight degrees and something comes back. The zoomies return. The ears go up. Dogs who spent August moving like they were being charged by the step suddenly want to do the long route. There is a reason the phrase is autumn zoomies and not July zoomies.
So the mud is a side effect of your dog being comfortable again. That is a reasonable trade for a hallway.
The bit that happens afterwards
You will be back at the door in forty minutes, which is where the honest part of this begins.
There will be a wet dog mid-shake in the hall. There will be a decision about whether the towel from last winter is still under the stairs or whether it went in the wash in April and never came back. There will be a paw print on something that is not supposed to have a paw print on it. At some point between now and Christmas your dog will find fox poo, and it will be a Tuesday, and you will not be ready.
None of this is a problem exactly. It is just a routine, and routines work better when the things they need are in one place instead of four.
Ours lives on a hook by the back door and it is three items. A microfibre drying towel with pockets for your hands, because a towel you can actually grip changes the whole performance. A bottle of fox poo remover spray, because the alternative is running a bath at half past six in the evening. And a walking bag, so the poo bags and the treats and the torch stop living in whichever coat you happened to wear last.
That is it. Not a system. Just the three things that stop the muddy season from feeling like an ambush every single time.
Nine more months
Because that is roughly what we are looking at. September to May, with a good week in February that fools everybody.
You will complain about it. You are allowed to. You will stand in a kitchen at seven in the morning holding a towel and a dog who is trying to make this into a game, and you will say out loud, to nobody, that this is ridiculous.
And then some evening in about three weeks, walking back in the near dark with the smell of wet leaves and a filthy dog trotting slightly ahead of you, doing the thing where they check over their shoulder that you are still coming, you will remember why this is the good season.
Summer is easy. Autumn is better.
The mud is back. So is your dog.
Everything for the walk is in Walkies, and everything for what happens afterwards is in Dog Grooming. Free UK delivery on orders over £30.