Of dogs and mice

After writing all about how Emma seems to have lost her bird dog talent she chose, today, to set me straight.

I walked out the door onto the porch this morning preparing myself for a full day of planting the remainder of the garden and flower pots but instead I was met by Ruth, Rebecca, and Caleb in a state of panic. Ruth stood by the rail sobbing and trying to tell me something about a dead something and how I must rescue the other something’s and baby something’s and blood. I was very confused. Caleb and Rebecca came to my aid. In a very concerned and sad voice Caleb told be that: “She killed the mommy and now the babies are gonna starve and it will be all our fault.” Rebecca further filled me in, in that the “mommy” Caleb referred to was a starling that had a nest up in our porch. Emma had somehow caught and killed the bird as it sat on the porch. I tried my best to console Ruth (withholding the information that Grandpa Jon Aldrich used to drown baby starlings in turpentine) and finally she calmed down when we discovered that there weren’t any babies in the nest at all. That was Emma’s surprise number one.

Number two happened not long after as I was proceeding to dirty my finger nails in the garden. Elizabeth was mowing the lawn down by the pond but all of sudden started yelling at Emma and leapt off of the mower. I yelled (we do a lot of yelling around here, because our yard is so large) down to her wondering if everything was all right. “She has a bird in her mouth,” she yelled back, “and she’s eating it alive!” When I looked closer I could tell that she did indeed have a bird in her mouth and it was disappearing at a rapid rate. Poor Elizabeth was trying in vain to get it out of the dogs mouth all the while yelling things like “ahh I can hear the bones crunching” ect. Emma of course ate the bird ( it was a Red Winged Blackbird in case you’re wondering) and Elizabeth and I went back to our work.

All this death reminds me of a little mouse named French Fry. French Fry was Megan and my mouse when we were about 10 or so. We found it in its nest in the hay field after the hay had been cut and bailed. We were thrilled to find such an adorable little creature to take care of.

Megan had gerbils at that point so we both thought we knew exactly how to care for a tiny mouse. We fed it with a medicine dropper and kept it in a tiny box…kind of like Thumbelina. Everything was fine until we decided that the baby was too cold, since it didn’t have much fur on it yet. That’s when we had the ingenious idea of putting it under the piano light. It was a good idea, since we saw our dad’s do kind of the same thing with baby chicks. Except we put the light too close to the mouse and since the mouse couldn’t move it….ah….fried. We were horrified with what we had done and in somber state we named him French Fry and buried him in the pet cemetery (which was pretty large).

The End.