It's a wet, wet world.

High: 66° F
Low: 58° F
Conditions: Continual showers.

The statistic on today’s morning radio said it all: it’s rained 28 out of the last 30 days here in Maine.

.

Everyone—human and animal alike—is feeling the effects in his or her own way.

Meteorologists and historians are interested as can be. They talk about the unique stalled trough off the coast of New Brunswick that keeps pushing sea air onto the mainland, saturating Maine with omnipresent drizzle and humidity. They note that last month was the third rainiest June on record. It was also one of the coldest, with high temperatures rarely exceeding our normal lows.

The whitewater kayakers in our lives are thrilled, too, since they are able to run hidden creeks and streams normally reserved for winter snowmelt. Probably there are other tiny niches of people—ones with fins and webbed toes, I suspect—who are also happy to be occupying soup that puts even Seattle to shame.

But that doesn’t mean much if you’re a canine naturalist.

Ari is a dog driven by sun: it wakes her in the morning and pushes her outdoors in the evening. Without it, she snoozes in a kind of timeless vacuum. Meal schedules become irrelevant. So too do otherwise precisely timed walks. And why not? The moral imperative for any good caninaturalist is to get outside and observe the world. But, really, that’s only interesting when there’s a world to observe.

Sure, there’s plenty to see outside right now: incredibly lush trees, the first blackeyed susans of the year, armies of slugs and earthworms, those intrepid whitewater paddlers. These sorts of things, though, have never really had the draw other species have had for Ari. This damp and dark has sent everyone retreating for dens and caves--a little bit of cozy dry in an otherwise soggy world.

It's almost as if Ari's favorite creatures—the martins and deer, the squirrels and neighborhood cats—seem to have come to the same conclusion she has: So far, this summer has gone anywhere but to the dogs.