My husband and I have a surefire prescription for joy. Spend a half hour or so watching the fun at a dog park. Not having a dog is no impediment to viewing the jubilation.

The best time to go is around 5:30 P.M. The dogs have been cooped up all day waiting for their owners to return. When the leash comes out, these pups are ready. They arrive at the park in a steady stream … the small and the tall, floppy eared and pointy eared, all quivering with excitement with tails wagging madly.

The minute the leashes are unsnapped, they are off, running madly in huge circles and greeting all their canine friends. Back ends are sniffed. Pecking orders are established. The play field becomes a happy jumble of racing, cavorting, leaping, fetching dogs.

I imagine what must be going on in their doggy brains:

i’m so happy i’m so happy oh boy oh boy oh boy this is so much fun i want to stay forever throw the ball throw the ball i can get it watch me go i’m a happy dog here’s the ball throw it again what are you waiting for throw the ball throw the ball i can get it here i go oh boy oh boy oh boy i’m on it i’m on it let’s stay here forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I once spent a happy evening in a park in Barcelona playing catch with a dog. We were sitting on a park bench smiling at a dog’s obvious joy at retrieving its tennis ball over and over.  Then the dog’s owner, a charming lady, smiled at me and offered me the ball. I don’t speak Catalan and she did not speak English, but her meaning was clear: please join in the fun. And I did, until the tennis ball was so soggy it was dripping.

Much to the displeasure of the Tooley Cats, dog visitors are always welcome at our house. We have the biggest dog park of all. It’s called the beach.

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One morning last week, my husband went out for the mail and came back with a bucket of meat.

“The raccoons will be happy tonight,” he laughed.

I wondered if I had just entered the world of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, that hilarious children’s book where food rains down from the sky.

My husband’s theory on the meat was more mundane. Approaching the mailbox, he saw two packages of pork sausages, one huge package of ground beef, a large fish fillet and a stick and a half of butter sprawled out on Lake Shore Road. All the food was in grocery store packages, but some were opened with a bit missing. Since a Packer game was held in Green Bay the night before, he surmised the bounty was fallout from a tailgate party.

At dusk the feast was spread out in the Tooley Cafe. We made bets on who would come and what would be gobbled up first. We were both wrong. A stray cat ate a bit of the fish, followed by a raccoon who grabbed a stick of butter, put it in his mouth and ran back into the woods. A steady parade of creatures followed and were still arriving when we went to bed.

The next morning the ground was licked clean. I recently heard a piece on NPR about a family who gets all their food by dumpster diving behind grocery stores for discarded, unopened food packages. They not only get all their meals, but also fill their freezer and have ample food to share with others.

We are not about to dive for our dinners, but we won’t waste good food either. There are always hungry mouths to be fed.

I am not afraid of bread. I love bread and eat it for breakfast (toast), lunch (sandwich) and dinner (rolls or french bread).

The phenomenon known as wraps was a total mystery to me. Finally, I asked a friend,”Why are you eating that?”

“I don’t want the calories in bread”, she replied.

So it is bread phobia that makes people consume those soggy, cold, tasteless, unmanageable bread substitutes, a.k.a. wraps.

In our Western culture, bread is deeply infused with historic and cultural significance. I am stunned that it is so easily shunned to save dubious calories. I would definitely prefer to break bread with friends rather than to break wraps. Jesus did not hand out wraps and fishes nor did he symbolically use wraps at The Last Supper. Wraps are not referred to as the staff of life.

Realtors advise home sellers to bake bread immediately before their home is shown. A cold wrap displayed on the kitchen counter will not lure potential customers. And ponder this: the most perfect meal may be homemade soup, fruit, cheese and crusty, warm bread.

Who’s afraid of the big, bad bread? Definitely not me. Bread lovers of the world, rise up! Bread is getting a bad wrap.

My husband and I have always considered ourselves to be tidy people … no mold in the fridge, toothpaste spit on the bathroom mirror or piles of unopened mail on the kitchen counter. The windows get a fall and spring washing and the vacuum cleaners (we own several because of our fur shedding cat population) are all in daily use.

However, we are coming to realize that others on the planet would find our standards a bit low. Those people live in the Netherlands. Having visited that compact country a number of times,we marvel at the entire nation’s housekeeping.

In hundreds of miles of travel, we have seen only shiny, slick paint on the houses, freshly scrubbed bricks, immaculately trimmed and pruned yards and flawlessly smooth roads. I’m guessing that the word “pothole” does not exist in their  language.

Windows are in a special category. Living in a gray, rainy climate, the Dutch crave natural light. Almost every home and apartment has multiple, huge plate glass windows. All these giant windows gleam sans streaks, spots or cobwebs.

I recently conversed with a charming, young Dutch man, who mentioned the program American Pickers which he watches on cable. He expressed fascination with the barns and yards full of hoarders’ trash that are fixtures of the series.

“Is this real,” he asked incredulously.

“I’ve got a few down the road from me,” I replied.

I think I’ve discovered one way the Dutch keep up those standards. Wandering in a Hema store (like a mini Target), I came across an entire aisle of scrub brushes. They came in all sizes from mini to giant, and in all shapes from flat to curved. Obviously, these armies of brushes are on active duty in the entire country.

Finally, after sixteen years, something is working.

Readers of this blog know that my husband and I are hugely inept gardeners. Lack of talent, however, has not stopped us from trying to create a bird and butterfly friendly yard.

At particularly low moments in our gardening odyssey, master gardener friends offered encouraging words.

“Prairie grasses really are very difficult to start,” said one friend after our second attempt at seeding had fizzled. Knowing that the project was not as easy as the seed company implied helped: our third planting was the one that worked.

Another gardening pro friend helped us view gardening as a series of experiments.

“If it doesn’t work, try something else,” she advised.

So after losing fifty cone flower plants, despite the fact that every gardening book stated they were perfect for our soil conditions, we did not plant more.

Now we wait to see what returns after our brutal winter winds and temperatures, and we plant more of the varieties that survived.

We’ve also learned that gardening is a journey that has no destination. Surprises, failures and changes are what make it all worth the work. We are definitely not in control, and that’s OK with us.

Click here to watch a whirlwind tour of our Summer 2011 blooms