Smell of spring

Nice warm, sunny spring weather brings the outdoors person out in me and eventually even I tend to go for a long walk in the sun. The nature is waking up after the winter sleep and snow is melting away fast and all that once was covered unfortunately comes out in the sun too usually smelling bad.

One thing that has been bugging me badly here in Finland is the lack of dustbins, somewhere to dispose of your garbage when in streets of the city, bus stops or in parks. And if there are such garbage bins they tend to be full of crap as they are apparently not emptied often enough. And many of them get kicked down with the garbage rolling around on the ground together with the garbage that did not fit into the full bin. So the garbage just tends to be thrown anywhere as there is nowhere else to put it, not to mention the problem of dogs droppings which always also becomes apparently bad smelling in the spring and as the Finns are a tribe of dog owners, there are quite a few dogs in this country and they seem to be tenderly looked after but not their droppings.

People walk their dogs in mornings and evenings but there is one problem with this idyllic picture, which is almost as bad as was Paris about twenty years ago. The situation in Paris has during the years improved immensely, as they have had campaigns on dogs not doing their number two on the pavement. Nowadays you can almost walk anywhere in Paris without having to step into dogs*t, just one or two not done into the gutter to accidentally tread on.

The dog droppings are almost as big a problem here in Finland, well the dogs normally don’t do it on the pavement, but in all parks you are supposed to pick it up afterwards and there are special containers in which to dispose of the sh*t but in wintertime this tends to be forgotten, or not cared about and as they say; “what is hidden in the snow you can not see”, but forgetting about the part that “it comes out in snow melt the spring”.

Springs smell badly, like a massive lost and found, big heap of of dogsh*t. And that’s exactly what it is and t is all over the place, in ditches on road edges, along pathways and parking lots in residential areas and in parks as well. Fortunately in not too long a time it disintegrates into fertilizer and make the flowers and grass grow. Maybe this is the thought behind the action, if there is any, but the smell of wet lawn combined with dog droppings is just so awful!