I’ve lived in my house for 25 years and have had five dogs, all rescues. They came to me age 5 to 7, and lived to be 13 or 14. They gave me plenty of love. They also gave me white hair.

Not mine, but theirs.

Four of the five had zillions of white hairs. Two were Dalmatians, one a basset hound and this most recent one — my first puppy — a yellow Lab so light in color he is almost white.

Twenty-five years and 14 vacuum cleaners later, my home is still hopelessly blessed with yearlong, dry snow storms, every time my dog does that funny waddle-shake, in which all of his skin seems to roll back and forth around his body.

I have learned (the expensive way) after initially purchasing a fancy upright vacuum advertised on TV by the guy who invented it, to buy only $70 upright vacuums. I’ve had them all: Eurekas, Bissels, Hoovers, Dirt Devils. You name it, I’ve tried it.

They choke to death on dog hair after two years, and I hang them in my garage like plastic trophies, antlerless electronic deer heads, mounted on the naked 2-by-4s near my car and lawnmowers.

White hair is everywhere in my home, even the top of the stove which is, unfortunately, black glass. It gets dusted three meals a day or I wind up with the delicious odor of burnt hair at meals.

Sometimes I find dog hair sage brush in the corners of a room or under the couch. I guess you’d call them dog-bunnies, not dust-bunnies.

I was a high school English teacher from 1987 until I retired in 2012 and my 11th graders never seemed to notice that my clothing was peppered (or salted) with white hair.

One fellow teacher even reassured me that in big cities, a man being covered in dog hair is a sign of yuppie nonchalance, dog lovers who like to silently display on their clothes the hair of the type of dog they own. It’s a kind of ice-breaker in city social situations, I guess.

So I never worried much about being liberally lathered with white dog hair, since it seemed to be a sign that I was cool and a yuppie and loved by a dog.

Whenever I wear black, however, I wrap my hands with inverted duct tape, sort of like an Egyptian mummy, and pat myself all over to get rid of the offending white hairs.

The black clothes come out looking fairly normal, and I end up with a pair of white-haired mittens.

I got by for decades this way until recently, when my brownish-red beard turned white. Now the yuppie explanation no longer makes sense when I am covered with white dog hair.

I just look like a slob whose beard is shedding.

Oh, did I mention that I also have a cat?

She’s white.

Paul Keane lives in Hartford.