The dogs ran off, headed straight for the stream where feral pigs had trampled its bottom into pools of brown mud during the night’s rainstorm.

“STOP!” I yelled, adding a string of expletives at the wildly wagging tails receding from us. Distracted by the fresh eggs, fat strawberries and shiny red tomatoes in my friend’s hands, I momentarily forgot that when Daisy, my wild dog, joyously collided with Makana, her wild dog, messy chaos ensued.

Makana, being slightly better behaved and better-trained than Daisy, returned at the third whistle. Daisy came panting around the corner of the patio a few minutes later, her bright pink tongue engorged by fierce aerobic exercise and most of her soaked torso coated in mud I knew from sad experience would never come out of my clothes if it got on me.

Thrilled to see me, as always, Daisy decided to shake a greeting; in seconds, I was splattered with hundreds of brown drops. So much for the new tank top I’d decided to wear to go visiting.

Instead of being glad my part-heeler cattle dog, a stray who found us eight years ago, had condescended to return instead of bounding off for the day, I was furious.

“You damned dog!” I growled, grabbing my friend’s hose with one hand while I gripped Daisy’s gooey collar with the other.

“I swear, you keep this up and I’m giving you to the dog catcher lady,” I barked, turning the nozzle on full blast.

As brown rivulets rolled off Daisy into Anja’s yard, she was bent over laughing. Even enduring a hated bath, Daisy kept grinning with her tongue hanging out. Makana, just out of hose range, wiggled in delight at this unexpected interruption of a boring nap.

I was the only one not having any fun.

A half-hour later, still steamed at the stinking dog beside me in the truck’s passenger seat, I ran into a friend headed to the beach for a quick swim.

“Come along,” she called gaily out her car window.

“No time,” I replied. “Too much work to do.”

“You’re always working,” she jibed good-naturedly. “Why not lighten up?”

I waved her off and drove on to the post office. In the parking lot, another friend was just leaving. Before I could complain about my day, she began ranting about hers – or rather, her kids’. With summer’s school recess almost over, she was fuming because “they didn’t get anything done but play.”

“Like what?” I asked, pausing to listen because I had soft spots for her two handsome, strapping teenage sons. She ticked off a long “to do” list guaranteed to put a damper on any kid’s freedom: clean the yard, paint the house, fix the gutters, vacuum the cars, mow the neighbor’s yard, then do it all over again.

Droning on, she wound up with a sigh worthy of a Law & Order death rattle: “And now they’ve gone off to the beach with a bunch of their friends and Lord knows when I’ll see them again!”

If I was them, I’d make sure it was a long time.

Tuning out her complaints, I wondered: Is she echoing the “work first, play later” attitude drummed into me by my parents? Had I become as much of a bore as she was? Was my husband’s recent “you’re not much fun anymore” complaint genuine?

Guilty as charged.

Nobody wants to listen to a martyr ticking off self-imposed deprivation. This is summer! Time to head to the seashore, the mountains, the fishing hole, amusement parks – and the season to give complainers and whiners a wide berth. Grab a beach towel and a trashy book, get out the tennis rackets, hoist the sail and slather on the sunscreen; November’s just around the corner.

With my stinking, filthy dog happily slobbering on my arm, I drove home wondering why, if I lived two miles from the beach, I’d only been there twice since April. Why was I always the last to arrive at a party, and among the first to leave? Why did I work past dark most days, and excuse my lack of physical exercise by saying I had to put in 10-hour days in order to get it all done – which I never do anyway.

Speed-reading through Dr. Edward M. Hallowell’s latest self-help book, CRAZY BUSY, I agreed with his subtitle that I was “Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap.” So what? I have been for years.

Aren’t we all?

Therein, insists Hallowell, lies the problem.

“Being too busy,” he writes, “which can seem unnecessary and unavoidable, can become a habit so entrenched that it leads you to postpone or cut short what really matters to you, making you a slave to a lifestyle you don’t like but can’t escape. You can be so busy that you don’t even take time to decide what actually does matter most to you, let alone make the time to do it.”

Bingo! The doctor is in!

When I took time to ask myself what matters to me, I realized I’m not sparing time to arrive at answers.

My husband matters most to me, but we’ve become mostly ships passing in the night.

My friends are important to me but I seldom take time to nurture our friendships.

I admire art, but don’t go to museums or galleries. I love working with my hands but my quilting basket, beading box and handmade paper for my homemade writing journals haven’t been touched in two years. I used to be a garage sale and estate auction enthusiast; now I just longingly read their notices in yesterday’s classifieds.

Asked to define who I am, I say: writer. Perhaps I should substitute “computer slave.”

My husband, reading over my shoulder just now, said: “So, what you going to do about this?”

To which I replied: “Well, maybe I should play more?”

“SHOULD?” SOMEDAY?” he asked. “SOMEDAY, after the rest of us are dead and gone while waiting for you to play more?”

Tomorrow. I will play tomorrow. I WILL play tomorrow. Like Daisy, I will run off and get muddy and pant and grin. Like my friend who is a lot more fun than I am, I will go to the beach. I will make my husband and my dog and my friends happy. I will make myself happy.

Will you?

IMPORTANT PLAY: Take time to list the five things that matter most to you, then take time to list how often you’ve enjoyed them in the past 10 days. Get the conversation going by sharing your answers here with your eons.com friends in Elsewhere in America.

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To read more about Tad, go to TadBartimus.com.