By Chad Love

About this time every year, when the redbuds start blooming, the toms start strutting and the white bass start running upriver, I must deal with coat issues. My chessie has one of the densest coats I’ve ever seen, far thicker than any of my other chessies, my old lab or virtually any other dog south of the Arctic circle. I've always joked that she’s the musk oxen of the canine world. I don't complain during duck season, because neither icy water nor thorn-tipped thickets can penetrate her coat. But eventually, the bill for that dense coat comes due, in the form of a period of time in the spring when her winter coat starts blowing out. It starts with a dull sheen to her coat, perhaps a little tuft here and there, floating on the breeze, caught on the fence. But like the first few gentle flakes that precede a raging blizzard, those innocent-looking fuzzballs are the advance guard, the shock troops for an annual deluge known around my house simply as “the shed.”