Mature Life Features

. . . and so do times.

Taking a glance back in your memories through

Flashbacks has been moved to 3:30 pm. Saturday

in the 2nd floor theater followed

at 4 p.m. by Travel with Sheldon.

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(An earlier piece about strange pets we had led to this one about…)

Pets That Left Us

We didn’t have a cat or dog around the railroad shack I spent much of my pre-school life in but we did have a pet crow.

On his way home from the railroad section house a five-minute walk down the tracks, my father stumbled onto a nest that had fallen out of a tree. Squawking under it were five scrawny chicks. He brought them home and, to appease his foreman, gave a couple to his daughters. Those chicks died within days so dad gave them another two chicks. He kept one for me.

It grew rapidly and soon claimed its perch on our clothes line, which gained my mother’s attention immediately, because it used to crap all over her clean laundry when she pinned it to the line. Mother would swing and swat at the bird that would hophophop down the line and back up again to avoid the broom and caw-caw-caw at her for trying to knock it off its perch. Somehow, mother managed to keep the laundry a lot cleaner than the dialogue she had with that bird.

As fall grew, the bird disappeared. We moved that winter to a larger house down the road a piece and, when spring arrived, the only person who saw that crow again was my father. It would fly to meet him when he got off work at 5 p.m. and then fly off in the direction of our former household. The only time I saw it again was one day when I went to meet dad as he quit work.

On another occasion during one of his regular tours to check his rabbit snares in the nearby bush, my father heard a small animal scrunching through under the brush. He chased it down and found a squirrel, It was a flying squirrel with one of its “webs” ripped. That stopped it from gliding from tree to tree on its scavenging nut hunts. Dad brought the animal home and quickly fashioned a small house for it so it could be protected from other animals while it recuperated.

We fed it peanuts and let it out periodically to walk around the clothesline stand so it could regain its strength and get used to us and its surroundings. One day it scratched its way up the clothesline post and tried leaping out to a nearby bench but fell short. We picked it up and placed it back in its little house. It stayed with us until late summer when it scuttled off to a nearby tree, climbed up high and launched its body to another nearby tree.  It spread out its legs and the webbing on both sides of its body held up. That was the last we ever saw of it. It never came back to say good bye.

The only other “pets” I had as a kid in the country were garter snakes. They were good looking and not too big and easy for us kids to catch them. Once you got one, all you had to do was put it in your pocket and it would curl up and stay warm. We had to let them go before we got home so we wouldn’t get swatted for keeping such dangerous beasts in our pockets.

I almost had a chipmunk for a pet during my teens. I was staying with a buddy and his family at their lakefront cottage when we spotted the little critter as we were preparing to get our canoe ready for a water ride. We chased it through the brush for a good 15 minutes. I got it but didn’t want to squeeze it to hard so John pulled of his T-shirt to form a sack bag we could keep it in. As I handed it to him, the chipmunk bit into his finger, making him lose his grasp and my vision of having a chipmunk for a pet vanished in the underbrush.

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