There it was, sitting in the middle of the floor, this brown blob.  (NO, it wasn’t that!).  It was a tennis ball.  It used to be regulation yellow, but now it was gnarly brown.  Why?  It had gone through the Lewis Treatment.

The Lewis Treatment consists primarily of taking whatever suits his majesty and burying it in the dirt, or more to his liking the mud.

For some inexplicable reason, dogs love mud.

All kinds of evidence point to the existence of the Lewis treatment.  First and foremost are the holes in the yard.  And might I say, a 140-pound dog can excavate a fair amount of Zoysia and substrata!  And of course, it can’t be just one.  Nooo.  The big fellow prefers his territory to look like an artillery practice field.  Such terrain does make it easier to practice chipping and putting (if I chipped and putted, but I digress).  And lawn mowers absolutely love the pock-marked look.  It gives the surviving grass that home haircut look.

The funniest evidence, however, is coming home from running errands or a similar outing and Lewis meets us at the gate all happy and slobbery but with one little difference – a muddy nose.  It sticks out like a red clown nose only it’s brown, but it’s just as goofy.  Suddenly it’s emergency inventory time.  What has mega-dog purloined now and processed it with….the Lewis Treatment?  It matters not to whom the object belongs – once obtained, most assuredly buried.

The problem with this eclectic burying is that while some objects are impervious to time and soil, others are not.  Imagine if you will, coming across that time-honored dog treat, the pig’s ear, after it’s been in the ground for a month.  It reminds me of what I’ve only read about the Body Farm in Tennessee (I’ll spare you the details.  You’ll have to Google it.).  Suffice to say, it’s not pretty.  The tennis balls just turn brown.  Pig’s ears turn, well, disgusting.

The problem (as if there were only one in this whole matter) is that Lewis forgets what and where he has buried things.  I don’t know enough about a dog’s memory capacities to be certain, but I wonder if when Lewis comes across one of his buried treasures, it’s like Christmas morning.  “Oh look!!  A pig’s ear.  Just what I wanted!  Merry Christmas to me!”

And now to the ultimate issue.  Once Lewis remembers and retrieves, he BRINGS THIS &^%$ INSIDE!  The only thing worse than finding a partially decomposed pig’s ear outside is finding one inside.  As a result, I’ve learned to step gingerly on dark rugs, or camouflage as I now refer to them.  So now, in addition to the twice-daily floor cleaning, we conduct an under-the-furniture, disgusting objects search.  That search is accompanied by much prayer that goes something like, “Please Lord, don’t let me find anything under here….that’s over a month old.”

During all this burying/retrieval process, we’ve learned something.  The Lewis Treatment has more than one meaning.  It also describes how we feel about this lovable lug when he bounces in from the back yard with a brown tennis ball in his mouth, drops it in our lap with a look that says, “Look what I found!”