The Biggest Mess Ever

What alias did I decide to use for our oldest kid? Tillie?

Okay. Once upon a time when Tillie was about three, I had to drive with her and her younger brother from one town to another. It was about a two-hour drive, the kind that passes like nothing when you are alone and stretches out for an eternity when you have small children with you.

Desperate to get Tillie to sit quietly in her carseat instead of screaming or trying to unstrap herself for two hours, I let her do whatever she wanted. What she wanted to do was to cut up big pieces of paper into tiny pieces of paper and throw them on the floor, so that’s what she did.

After an hour on the road, we drove through a McDonald’s for drinks. I glanced into the back seat and hoped that the people at the drive-through window couldn’t see into the car very well, because it was just awful back there. It looked like someone had emptied trash cans into our car. Lots of trash cans.

As we pulled up to the drive-through, Tillie looked around the back seat and said in a thoughtful sort of voice, “This is the biggest mess this car has ever been.”

Now, when it comes to messes, you’d think that kids would be the winners, the high achievers of Messdom. In looking back over years (and years) with both kids and pets, though, I think the pets win.

Dog throw-up. That’s what comes to mind when I think of the biggest messes ever.

I’m sure there are people who go whole lifetimes without ever having to clean up dog throw-up. I can’t quite picture them, them and their undoubtedly sterile and lonely (and clean) lives, but I’m sure they’re out there.

I myself have cleaned up more than my share of dog messes, having had dogs all my life and also worked for years as a dog groomer.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Biggest Messes Ever, happened before I had kids, which would make it over eighteen years ago. We had a fat yellow lab, Frosty, and a small yellow mutt, Og. We were at my mother-in-law’s house.

Some chicken had spoiled in the refrigerator before anyone cooked it, so somebody threw it away in a trash can. The trash can was within reach of the dogs. The only thing more disgusting than spoiled raw chicken, I found, was spoiled raw chicken that has been eaten by dogs, digested for about fifteen minutes, and thrown up on a dining room rug.

Years later, somebody left a whole carrot cake, wrapped in plastic wrap, on the kitchen counter of another house. A black-and-white mix named Myrtle finished off the whole thing. I think she would have digested it just fine if only she hadn’t eaten the plastic wrap too, but as it was, she threw the whole thing up on the dining room rug (different house, different rug—what is it dogs have about the dining room rug?).

The reason all this comes to mind right now is that when we were in Mexico recently, we left my mother (alias Grandma) with our youngest children and our pets. I told her told her told her that Thurber (large black lab) will eat anything that’s not nailed down, or at least put up real high. We think he was starved as a young puppy and he has something akin to a doggy eating disorder.

First Grandma lost half a loaf of raisin bread to Thurber, because she left it on the counter. Then she decided to thwart him by putting a whole loaf of bread on top of the microwave which sits on the counter, on the theory that it would be too high for him to reach. He ate that too. He never did throw up, she says, but he barked to go outside every few hours that night.

All this brought to my mind last Easter and Thurber’s Biggest Mess Ever, the infamous Easter Basket Incident.

Thurber got into a kid’s Easter basket. Most everyone knows chocolate is toxic to dogs, and vets frequently see sick dogs after Easter. This basket didn’t have any chocolate in it, though—just jelly beans. A lot of jelly beans. An awful lot of jelly beans. Maybe what he actually got into was the bag of leftover jelly beans, I don't know. He ate them. I don’t know what else was in there, but whatever it was, he ate it all.

We found this out when we came home that night to the biggest mess ever in our bedroom. I usually shut Thurber in our room when we are gone. Unfortunately, if he needs to throw up, he likes to do it on our bed. I don’t know if this is a comforting place for him to be when he’s sick, or if that’s just where he happens to be sitting at the time. Anyway, he threw up all over our bed, all down the headboard, which dripped under the bed, and then he got down and threw up all over the floor too. Maybe he ran out of space on the bed.

The stuff actually seeped under the door and into the hall, so I could see it even before I opened our bedroom door. The good thing was that our room has hardwood floors, so at least I didn't have to try to figure out how to get the stuff out of carpeting.

It wins the prize as Biggest Mess Ever. As it turns out, you can’t just wipe up half-digested jelly beans. The sugar content means that the throw-up is sticky, and once it hardens, it’s pretty much there. I tried wiping it up. I tried spraying with cleaner. I finally had to take bowls of hot water into the room, pour them on the stuff, wait for the hot water to dissolve the sugar, and then wipe up the mess, in addition to washing every piece of bedding and throwing away two pillows that seemed irredeemable. I never did tell my husband (alias Fred, as in Flintstone) what happened to those pillows. He still complains every now and then that he doesn’t ever seem to be able to keep enough pillows around.

There’s no moral here, no lesson, no particular point really. Just something I felt like writing down.

The End.