A Bit Biographical

When I was a little girl, I was always getting into some kind of trouble.  Blessed with good ideas that often went wrong, I could have been the poster child for the don't let this happen to your kid club.  Whether it was leaning against a porch railing that hadn't been fixed and falling face first on a cement cinder block, crashing into a tree on a mini-motorbike, or much to my Mother's horror - finding one half of my leg stuck in a toilet bowl, I was a magnet for mayhem.  

Trouble and I went hand in hand, and were often good bedfellows.  Proven by the fact that I almost choked to death on a nickel I had snuck into the top bunk of my fire engine bunk bed. And later on, my habit of jumping from one piece of furniture to the next, in order not to touch the floor whenever the lights happened to be off.  (This done - of course, to avoid the boogie monster that had taken up residence beneath my bed.)

But worst yet, the day when home alone, I decided to ride my bike only to find that the garage was locked and the bike unobtainable.  Patience, never a virtue I was very fond of, or good at, led my young self to the back window which was easily jimmied to an open position.  And up I went, scraping my knees against the side of the building as I shimmied myself through the open window, angling my body and my legs just right in order to catch the floor.  Except something caught me ... And there I dangled like a hat on a coat rack with my supergirl red shorts snagged on a vice grip located right beneath the window, until rip, rip, rip, I fell to the floor in a not so graceful fashion.

But what didn't cause me bruises, scrapes or pain often times backfired on those around me.  Such was my penchant for pets of unusual natures, as I was keen on finding anything wild, in hopes to domesticate it.  

Take for instance, Harold.  When I found him, he was napping in a half stack of firewood waiting to be hauled inside by our empty red wheelbarrow.  It was love at first sight, and in we went to the waiting white bird cage hanging empty in the basement, ready to be a home.  Despite my knowledge of rodents, the small, fuzzy and cute hamsterish kind, it failed to dawn on me the bats natural ability to squeeze itself out of tight places.  An error which my Mother was none too pleased to hear about when my sweet little bat took to flying about the basement for 3 weeks, until later he finally managed to find his way back to the outside world.

But nothing much stopped me from having my pets.  Not even my stepfather running over my pet snake with the lawnmower, or having to feed baby robins every three seconds one summer long, or rooming with a chirpy little duckling nestled in a laundry basket beside my bed despite her constant chatter while occasionally playing dress up with my dog Pickles, a small hunting beagle that looked really, really good in blue dresses.  Still, there was nothing that could compare with Butterscotch, my jersey calf.

A gift from the farm down the road - a second family of sorts to me - I use to walk her around the yard, laughing as her wobbly knock knee legs tried their best to run after me in a game of chase and catch.  She was the sweetest thing ever, large doe eyes with lashes so long they seemed to go on for miles.  And though I often worried what my parents plans for her future would someday be, every day despite the walk to the old shed with a heavy pail of formula and stall cleaning chores to be done, I looked forward to our time together.  But one fateful morning, her small brown head didn't greet me from the slats in her stall, and the welcoming moo itself was silent.  Instead  a small body lay still nestled in the hay, and I instinctively knew she wasn't sleeping.

Despite my losses and my brief interludes with danger, running from a bull at full speed after a fishing trip gone horribly wrong and finding myself stuck in a pine tree for three hours as a circle of really MAD COWS butted their heads against the tree in order to get me down, I managed to reach adulthood.  (As witnessed by the wordiness of this here blog.)  

And while I may not be as reckless as I once was, I'm very much still the wild child.