The late great Katie, our beloved dog for 14 of her 17+ years, got a bath about every other week until she was quite ancient. It kept her sweet smelling, kept her shedding down, and although we had to chase her down and carry her (with a pathetic look on her face that screamed: “Not the bath!”) to the shower, she behaved fairly well once there. But Kate was a mere 50 pounds.

Bathing Ruby, the Moose Dog, is a bigger endeavor. She weighs around 70 pounds, maybe a little more. Her favorite game is “chase me”, so trying to get her into the shower can turn into an exhausting game that she loves (and is really good at). And then the actual washing and rinsing can take a long time because she’s big and seems to hoard dirt in her fur as if each grain was a key clue to the eventual destruction of the world squirrel population.

Katie, post bath, smelled like whatever dog shampoo we used — mostly some happy organic tree huggy thing, probably with something citrus to help make her less appealing to bugs. Ruby, though, smells like wet dog, a phrase I never understood with Katie because when wet, she just smelled like Katie, only wet. But the pong that comes off a wet Ruby gives me an understanding of all those jokes from old sitcoms about the smell of a wet cheap fur coat.

Still, she’s scratching a little, and suffers from allergies in the spring and fall; she’s shedding; and she smells like she needs a bath. So I’ll leash her and walk her upstairs. Once she knows its bath time, she will walk into the shower under her own power. The biggest danger is making sure I keep my feet out of the way of her feet. That girl can ruin a pedicure.

After a bath, both dogs have the same act: run around the house like a mad dog with her tail on fire. Three, four, five circuits of both floors and then settle down to obsessively lick until at least some of the clean dog smell is replaced with that good old dog stink. Ruby will leave a puppy’s worth of hair in the shower drain, and another puppy’s worth on the micro-fiber quilt that I use to protect my bed.

Like Kate before her, Ruby seems to get that after the bath, people like to snuggle with her more. Maybe that’s why she is so willing to walk to her perceived doom. Katie took a little longer to figure it out than the big baby we have now.

I don’t think anyone (aside from my older brother in particular and older brothers in general) likes tormenting the ones they love. But it’s like so much of life: you do something unpleasant now to reap pleasant rewards later. So the bath it is tonight, blue and teal toenails be damned. And tomorrow, when she stands over me in the wee hours, her nose to mine, waiting for me to show the slightest evidence of wakefulness, I will at least know that I’ll awaken from her breathing on me. Or walking on me. Or lying on top of me. Not because she smells bad enough to wake the dead.