There's Something Fishy Going On In The Animal Kingdom...

The first thing I do every morning is milk the goats. This is before caffeine, breakfast, or NPR, and I am not at my most alert. I walk half asleep in my coveralls and rubber boots into the barn, hang up my bucket, and start scooping out grain and throwing hay. So yesterday, when a wren flew straight at my face as I was reaching to hang up the bucket, I fell on my behind with a not-so-elegant shriek. Of course a wren is harmless, but anything flying at my face that early in the morning is going to knock me on my butt.

As it turned out, this was the first of several close encounters with the animal kingdom yesterday. After the milking was over, I went for my morning walk. Still not fully awake, I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to my surroundings and was therefore very close to the dead armadillo on the side of the road before I saw it. Armadillos are not very attractive when they are alive, and death by oncoming vehicle does not improve matters. I jumped about a foot, collected myself, and made a wide circle around the poor thing.

On my drive to work, I saw a peacock walking down the side of the road. This was when I started wondering who turned on the Magical Realism.

Work was uneventful, and I made it back home and onto the porch before the creatures of the world reentered the scene. We have a tiny, cute as a button bunny rabbit living under our porch that comes out in the evening to munch on the chickweed. I got to watch it peacefully chewing, sniffing, and hopping for a while last night, and I thought, okay, maybe the animal kingdom isn’t staging a revolt afterall. That pleasant feeling lasted until I found a frog in the yurt, which the C.F. caught and removed.

The C.F. went up to bed to read, and I followed a little while later to find the light had become a sun with at least a million bugs of all shapes and sizes orbiting its brightness. I’m not afraid of bugs, but when there are that many of them winging circles six feet over one’s bed it is hardly restful. So I pretended they weren’t there by ducking my head under the covers to fall asleep while the C.F. read on. A little while later, he nudged me and said there was a luna moth in the porch. Luna moths are so beautiful, the green of new leaves, and just as I peeked my head out to look, it dove straight at my face. I shrieked and it flapped around my head and I shrieked and it flapped for several seconds before continuing its lunar orbit around our light. At this point I was laughing in that hysterical way a person laughs when they have just been screaming. “What?!” I cried. “What else?!”

Unfortunately, the animal kingdom wasn’t quite through with us. Reading peacefully, minding his own business, a wasp stung the C.F. on his neck. If the animals of the world are trying to tell us something, I don’t get it.