Sep 28, 2022 3 min read

When I was in middle school, my best friend and I used to sit on the back porch swing and just “watch the cars go by,” as we used to joke to our parents. We would laugh and joke and talk about anything as the occasional car would pass through our usually quiet neighborhood.

Back in the day, the cars were few and far between, and you’d occasionally see a friendly neighbor walking their dog after dinner. My dad would often have the Pirates game on the radio with Bob Prince narrating each pitch. Sometimes in the fall, we could hear the high school band practicing off in the distance.

Granted, it’s been a long time since those days, and the entire world seems to have changed. One thing that hasn’t changed is that I love to sit on the porch swing on a warm evening, though I find myself so busy that I don’t do it as often as I’d like. Gone are the days that I (honestly) even care that the Pirates are playing baseball, and our formerly quiet neighborhood seems to have become a main thoroughfare for half of the cars in town. The average American family now owns two cars while 35% of American households own three or more cars, so both traffic and the frequency of people parking extra cars on both sides of the streets have increased through the years. I still think our neighborhood is pretty quiet, but it definitely has more traffic than it used to.

Something else that has increased dramatically is the dog traffic. Every spring, people seem to emerge from their hibernation and start taking evening walks through the neighborhood with their dogs. What’s funny is that I used to know all of these people and their dogs.

Nowadays, there are so many people walking so many dogs, and I don’t know half of them or where they live. I’ve gotten to know several of them who always have a friendly wave or smile. One family used to have a Great Dane and Chihuahua on evening walks with the family, eventually growing to include a toddler in a stroller. Now, one couple appears each night with four dogs. I’ve never seen such a puppy parade! It makes me wonder what these dogs do all winter while they’re stuck indoors.

I know my daily walking routine changes with the weather, so I laugh and wonder whether the dogs are happy to get a break from having to exercise outside in the winter or are they chomping at the bit to get outside? If they’re like me, they take one look at the snow and say, “No thanks!”

We still have a couple more months of dog-walking weather before we’ll have to hunker down for the snow and cold. Until then, I’ll try to get a few more evenings on the swing to enjoy the puppy parade!

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.