So today I’m up bright and early. I made the beds and then made the oatmeal, which some prefer to call porridge, though I don’t for the life of me know why. Porridge sounds so gruelish.
Anyway, our breakfast, no matter what it is, never turns out right for our tastes, so we’ve always just put it in the bowls on the table and left it out to see if it’s better later.
Actually my husband, Barry, and I never have had a good breakfast. It’s always too hot or too cold. But for some reason little Beatrice’s is nearly always just right. That’s important.
So this morning around 8 am, a little creature, I’ll call her Blondie, came to our house, evidently just after we left for our early morning pre-breakfast jog around the forest to get our breakfast temperatures adjusted.
When we got back to the house, the door was ajar and there was mud on the carpet. We always wipe our paws at the door. Don’t I just hate tracked in dirt! There were little creature prints on the floor everywhere! We followed them into the kitchen where we saw that someone must have tried our oatmeal. Our spoons were still in the bowls. It appeared that she liked Beatrice’s best, because it was gone, along with most of the honey we’d put out to use on the oatmeal. Boy, I love that stuff! But anyway…
Beatrice wasn’t too pleased. But neither was Barry. He doesn’t even like it if I try a bite of his food!
From there we followed sticky fingerprints into the Library where we often sit and read our favorite books about those odd unfurred creatures that live outside of the woods. In the Library, what do we see? Right. She’s been in all the chairs. You can tell that, as the fur on your arms stick to the arms of the chairs, thanks to the honey-eater. Now that wouldn’t be so bad, as I can clean honey off of most anything you give me. I’ve got a good strong cleaning tongue for tidying up Beatrice’s face and ears. But I can’t fix Beatrice’s favorite rocker. It’s been totally destroyed. This creature must be heavier than Beatrice…but after eating all that oatmeal with honey, I’m not surprised.
It looked like she had decided to go upstairs and read some books, as there were books strewn all over the stairs. She must have had her arms full and dropped some on the way up. Or maybe she just didn’t think she’d be able to find her way downstairs again and was dropping “bookcrumbs”….or using “bookmarks”! Ha! That was a good one! Beatrice calls these "Mama jokes", but she doesn't laugh, she just sighs.
Well, we followed the books upstairs. There was a very heavy book left on Barry’s bed. It was his favorite book, “Jack and the Beanstalk”. And a very nice one called “The Little Red Hen” was still on my bed. When we looked over at Beatrice’s bed, there was a big pile of books beside it and a little creature with very blond hair lying there holding the book, “Little Red Riding Hood”. Her eyes were closed though. It appeared that she had fallen asleep while reading it.
Not being too crazy about finding a creature in our house, we yelled and waved our arms to scare her away. It was pretty effective, as she opened her eyes very suddenly and screamed something about big bad wolves…which we aren’t, and we don’t even know any…
We were happy to see her leave, swiftly weaving her way down the stairs past the books she’d dropped and out the front door.
Beatrice says the creature was "so cute" and wants one for a pet. Barry says we should set a trap and install an alarm system. But I don’t think we’ll see her again. I've stopped leaving out food. Seems to attract pests.
by Donna J.T. Smith
12/27/2010
