Chucky Critter

I found a skull today. Walking off the path in the woods of our property, I passed something hanging from a spindly tree branch that I couldn't identify, so I had to take a better look. This strange little skull was just hanging from a thin, low-hanging branch that I'm surprised could even hold its weight. The last time I checked, skulls don't grow on trees. This thing had been purposely placed there.

I found a receipt in my jacket pocket and used it to pluck the little thing off and carried it home, hanging by my fingertips protected by paper. Alex couldn't identify it . . . it's too big to be a squirrel and the snout portion isn't long enough to be a racoon. It might be a cat (which is pretty creepy considering recent events) or a small dog.

Cosmically speaking, what the heck does it mean when you find something like this? Maybe I've invited some sort of critter demon into my home by removing it. The next thing we know, we might have the makings of a B horror movie - an unidentified skeleton rising from the dead and wreaking havoc on our lives. Maybe I'll name it Chucky.

Fences and Borders

In absolute boredom, I took a quiz on Facebook: What is your inner nationality? It came up as German. I thought surely after I answered the question of how many kids do I want as "1, if any," I would get the result of Chinese. Yet, the description seemed fairly apt - not smiling unless I really mean it, wanting to live on an island away from everything currently around me, etc . . . Although the quiz is absolutely ridiculous, it reinforces something I've already been thinking about for a really long time: I don't want to live here.

When I used to have an online journal (an amount of years ago that I don't want to admit), one thing I wrote about a lot was wanting my dual citizenship with Costa Rica. A long time ago, I spent my summers there, working "under the table" as a poolside bartender for my room and board. I fell in love with the country and thought it to be vastly superior to my own. Ironically, my father and stepmother recently sold their house and moved there, inciting near-insane jealousy.

My latest dream has been moving to Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico. I actually thought that it was a shared dream with my husband. We have talked about it for months. Since I work online, my job can follow me anywhere, and it would be more than enough for us to live on. He said he could cash in his retirement, giving him enough to invest in a boat, so he could charter ocean fishing trips. Since Puerto Escondido is a budding tourist community, we would have had the opportunity to get in on the ground level. We have been planning to move in December, but when I mentioned it today, he fell silent. It is clear now that he does not have any real intention of going. Although I can understand his reticence to leave family and memories behind for an uncertain future in a foreign land, I can't help but be disappointed.

The point is: what is it about me that makes me want to live so far away from where I am? Am I running away from bad memories, suffering from a case of "the grass is greener on the other side," or do I really just not belong?

The Beginning and the End

My intention when I created my blog account last night was for it to be about the trials and rewards of my first real garden. Yesterday, I planted my first seeds and marked the beginning of my project. That plan adapted when my husband woke me up just after 6 am this morning saying, "Honey, I'm sorry, but Sophie's dead." My decaffeinated mind wasn't able to grasp the meaning of his words, and my only thought was "What? How? Huh?" When he told me that she got out and the dogs had killed her, I couldn't imagine how Sophie managed to get outside or really comprehend that she was gone. Then, it registered that it was our dogs - specifically one dog - that had killed her.

"Odie killed my cat?"

He tried to tell me that it was all of them. We have three daschunds and one geriatric pug, but only one of them is capable of such an atrocity - the devil's dog, Odie. (He was a rescue dog from an abusive home and acts bi-polar as a result of whatever trauma he endured. He bites anything and anyone with little to no rhyme or reason.) Since we moved to the edges of Mountain Pine in an extremely rural setting, I've now lost three cats. I moved here with my three kitties: Valentino (22), Rowan (18), and Gumbo (1). With the exception of my opossum, Victor (whose lifetime was expected to be relatively short), my animals don't die on me and live to ripe old age. Apparently, not anymore. I learned of my two oldest cats' deaths on the same day in the middle of last year, shortly after my husband and I moved here. Thinking it would be safe for them to spend a little time outside, one of my few redneck neighbors poisoned them. Although a probably toothless ignoramus was responsible, I've always secretly blamed Odie.

I'm more of a cat person and my husband is definitely a dog person, so, when we first moved in together, we ended up with a lot of pets. It wasn't a pretty situation. Three of the dogs get along pretty well with cats, but Odie would only try to bite and harangue them. So, I began dividing the house with a child gate and there became a cat side and a dog side. Two of the daschunds are able to scale or jump it, but they are cat-friendly and just want to play. The problem is that the living room is on the dog side, and the cat side has two spare bedrooms and a bathroom. Attention-wise, the dogs have the better end of the deal because they naturally have more interaction. I began to sense that the cats -despite my visits- were getting bored, so I let them go outside sometimes to lay in the sun, eat grass, and whatever else cats do to entertain themselves. What happened? Since I couldn't integrate the cat and dog population due to one uncooperative dog, my two oldest cats died. Today, that death toll went up to three.

About six months after the double feline homicide, I was ready for another cat. So, as a holiday present to myself, I went to the local shelter to find a younger kitty, thinking that maybe the dogs and my one remaining cat would instinctively want to parent it, paving the way to a harmonious, child gate less household. The first kitten I saw was Sophie. The guy at the shelter opened the cage so I could see her better, and she jumped on my shoulder and took her place parrot-style, purring and licking my ear. Although I looked at all the kittens still with the fluffy black cat roosting on me, I knew instantly that she was the one.

Eventually, it became clear that my dream of cat and dog harmony was not going to come true. Although Maggie, OJ, and Mae Mae were just fine with Sophie and Gumbo, Odie only wanted to hurt them. So, the child gate remained. Sophie courageously tried to interact with him and lost her too-short life.

I demanded that Odie be removed from the house under threat of shooting him, and he's gone to my mother-in-law's. Sophie's buried next to Rowan beneath the shade of a large gum tree. Rest in peace, Sophie.