Two Doodles, a Chicken, and Field Mice!!

[Laurie, Fudge, and Vern]

My dogs and I walk every day up at our nearby park.  I love to walk in the cold weather, because I don’t have to worry about snakes.  I hate snakes and since I am always frantically looking for them, I usually am the one to see them on our walks.  I also know when I am walking with my husband and he turns suddenly and says, “let’s go a different way,” that translates to “snake up ahead and husband does not want to have ear drums blown out by screaming wife.”  How I raised two kids who are not afraid of snakes, I do not know, but I did.  When they were little, whenever we went to a petting zoo or someone came to school with a Reptile show, my two little darlings would be the first ones to raise their hands if they asked for volunteers to come up closer to see the snake.

 

Once, they helped hold a very large snake that could have easily dined on them for supper and I turned to the woman next to me and told her, “If that thing wraps itself around my daughters and starts squeezing, I am really going to miss those two when they are gone.”  No motherly instinct to protect my children kicked in at any point during that demonstration, just sheer horror.  One other time, I went to school to pick up my oldest daughter and she came towards me with two small snakes wrapped around her arms. It seemed her teacher’s daughter brought in her pet snakes and my daughter thought it would be a good idea to test her mother’s reactions in the hallways of her school.  Let’s just say we both knew that day that she could have asked for anything and gotten it by threatening to put that snake on me, but she also knew that eventually she had to relinquish those snakes back to the rightful owner and go home with her mother.  In the end, she made the right choice, the one that allowed her to walk the halls of that school without being pointed at and called, “the girl with the handprint tattoo,” mistakenly doled out by a mother thrashing about in a panicky attempt to escape.

 

Another time, while the girls and I were visiting with my in-laws overnight, they had a bat in the house.  They had wisely not told me they were having trouble with bats before our arrival, because I am sure they realized, if they had, they would never see their grandchildren again at their house after dusk and we would have stayed at a nearby hotel.   Upon our arrival, my sister-in-law informed me that they had had a “little trouble” with a bat in the house the previous nights.  Now, in my book, a “little trouble” means there is a part of your hair you can’t get right in the morning, it does not mean a wild creature, that has been featured in every Vampire movie you have ever seen, is flying loose throughout the house where you are now staying.  She also told me not to worry because the bat never came out after midnight and proving, once again, that desperate people are inclined to believe anything, I felt safer since it was nearing that mark.  Well, sure enough, that bat made an appearance after midnight and I barricaded myself in my room like I was starring in one of those Slasher movies.  Thankfully, my sister-in-law had taken cover in the room where my daughter’s were staying and kept them company for the night.  I tried to yell reassuring words to them from across the hall, but they later said, “we are all going to die,” did not comfort them.  They also wanted to know why I didn’t come to them to make sure they were ok and I made a mental note to myself to start encouraging them to watch Roseanne and lay off the Hallmark movies.

 

Why am I telling you all this? Not because I want you to see that my motherly motto is, “survival of the biggest, loudest, and most afraid,” but because I want you to understand the magnitude of my fears when it comes to stuff like snakes, bats, and mice, which finally leads me to the point of this blog.  So, getting back to my walk in the park…I have been happily walking with my dogs in the cold weather without a care in the world.  I told myself that there is nothing to fear.  All of God’s creatures, that I hate, are on hiatus until summer.  From time to time, we see the occasional groundhog, deer, or squirrel, but they don’t bother me, so I never put two and two together as the dogs and I walked along in the grass.  Sure, I have seen them bury their noses in the flattened grass and I have seen both of them leap in the air as if they just stepped on something, but I just assumed they were smelling the horses that walk on the same trail and jumping for joy to be on our walk. 

 

Sunday, while walking with the dogs and my husband, Fudge and Vern excitedly buried their noses in the grass, like they always do, and my husband said, “they must smell all the field mice that burrow themselves in the matted down grass.” WHAT?  “You mean to tell me, the mice have not hitched rides on the backs of some accommodating birds and gone south for the winter?” I asked him.  So, he went on to tell me, and this is why I hate those nature shows that educate people, the winter habits of mice, and I told him I prefer to live in my state of ignorant bliss and things got heated and he said I should stop advertising that fact and I told him to stick his head in the tall grass and choke on a mouse and he said I was real mature and I said I know you are, but what am I, and he knows I can say that forever, so we stopped arguing. The damage is done, however, and now I know that on my walks with my dogs, I am putting myself in great peril and there is a possibility that one mouse with a faulty GPS system is going to go up my pant’s leg when he should have gone down, and my life will be over.   I know what you are all thinking….there goes Fudge and Vern’s walks, but come on, we are talking about Fudge and Vern, my four legged babies.  I just need to find my snow gators to thwart those wayward mice or stop conversing with my husband on our walks.  I had better start looking for my gators.

[Deanna & Desi & Cori]

Another blog to which I can fully relate!!!!  I am an animal lover - as long as I'm viewing them from afar or from behind an impenetrable barrier!  About the only exceptions to this are dogs and cats!  If it slithers, crawls, hops, flies, darts about, etc., please keep it away from me!!!  And, clearly, Laurie, you did a much better job than I in not passing your fears onto your offspring.  I think my daughter is even more afraid of creepy, crawly creatures than I am.

Hope you find those gators - or would you prefer a full on Hazmat suit!!!

[Pat and Traveler]

The horror....the horror...   Great blog, Laurie!  I have a mouse in the house right now!  Ewwwwwww.  In the kitchen.  I have a trap (humane trap) set for it, but so far it has found plenty of other goodies to keep it happy and in residence.  At least it isn't a snake.  I'm trying to tell myself that.  LOL

[Bonnie and Kona]

I hope Vern and Fudge have the good sense to frighten those mice away from their mom not toward her pantleg.I am with you on the bats. Terrifying. After walking through a tunnel in England at dusk and being swarmed by legions and legions of bats, I do not ever want to see another one. Unfortunately, my granddaughter loves bats and when we go to the children's zoo, that is her first and only request... the bat cave. of course.