Critter Rescue
Somewhere after three o’clock in the morning I saw them – hundreds of silky hot air balloons – like Jellyfish Lake, attempt to land in the old cow field across the road from the Big House. A storm was coming, a big storm, and they had to land. But I knew they’d never make it. Too many of them. And the storm was coming too fast. Some of them did though.
When I woke from that curiosity several hours later, it was a Saturday morning at home. No 6:15 alarm. And Oxbear left me a brownie for breakfast. On Saturdays, that’s a little bit less of a sin.
About an hour later, I pointed out a spider meandering around the kitchen wall to Oxbear. I’ve never been a screamer, and I’ve gotten pretty used to spiders over the years. It wasn’t uncommon to find a brown recluse a few times a season down in my old basement bedroom back at the Big House. And this one was only of the garden variety. Yali, on the other hand, was actually excited by the little critter. He jumped up and down, practically clapping his hands, as Oxbear let him observe the little guy under a glass before sending him back into the great outdoors.
It was about one o’clock. Oxbear and Yali were out running some errands together. Puck had already gotten his fill of “Phineas and Ferb” while I cleaned up “The House that Never Stays Clean”. So we decided to take a walk in the relative mild warmth of the afternoon. Puck pedaled away on his too-small bike. He was already on a mission.
“Get away from that worm, BIRD!”
He stormed towards the robin in question, which flew to the branches of a nearby tree. The almost snake-sized worm was wiggling across the pavement for its life, so I lifted him with a scrap branch and tossed him into the shade of the neighbor’s yard.
Puck must have felt some sense of satisfying justice out of this rescue, so he continued scaring away more birds from their mid-day meals as we walked the circuit. After awhile, though, he started feeling guilty about the whole thing.
“I kind of feel bad for the birds though, Mom. That’s really the only food they have. People just don’t really feed them with seeds and stuff anymore.”
Before we returned home, I had to stop him from collecting no less than a rusty wrench and a rusty shovel, and also keep him from hacking into a tempting pile of junk waiting for Monday morning’s trash collection at a corner house. Although I did allow the large brass-y sort of ring that had rolled off a discarded lamp fixture, which he later put on Yali’s head to make him “an angel”.
“I think I might be an archaeologist when I grow up, Mom.”