The wolverine my son loves best at our sparsely populated zoo is gone. Quietly, and somehow our nation is not alarmed, the wolverine population is threatened with extinction. How this has come to be we don’t know, but we are informed while staring into the wolverine exhibit (sans wolverine) to find the hiding owl, that our wolverine is successfully reproducing in another zoo back east. We’ll never see him again.
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At night, when the house quiets down, a hot bath and a good book is called for. In the power camp house we grew up in along the Missouri River, we each had a turn for a hot bath night. Mine fell on Tuesdays. Only when you ran out of hot water did you wrap up in a towel and race for your bedroom–knowing the mice, thinking everyone had fallen asleep, had come out of hiding to investigate bread crumbs on the kitchen floor. Scurry.
And even now, living alone–I wait for the house to fall asleep. Then: hot bath, good book. Transported. And when I do wrap up in a towel, instinct still sends me quickly to the safety zone of my bed.
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She hadn’t noticed the flower. Not until the bee came along. –Little Bee
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What we like best about our zoo is that no one goes there. And no one goes there because we have so few exhibits. Which is what we like because none of us like to see caged animals. But, the walk along the creek and the canyon, through the many groves is excellent.
And now, we hear Bruno, the grizzly bear, is to have cake. Banana cake with applesauce instead of sugar. For the Super Bowl. Bruno, the director tells us in a low voice, used to be in a bad circus. They never fed him well and now he has only a few teeth.
We watch Bruno play with a frozen melon swinging from a rope, taking his time eating it. When he hears the zoo director’s voice, he leaves his swinging melon and ambles across the field, through the pond, over the fallen trees and approaches. His head sways back and forth, as though to tune into the conversation.
Shhh, the cake is meant to be a surprise.
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Shoeshopper’s granddaughter recalls the day they found a baby skunk hiding beneath her grandmother’s outdoor freezer. The black and white furball not budging. How to liberate a baby? A trail of dog food leading from the fence line out past the line of cottonwoods and the irrigation canal, through the grass, across the concrete pad, up the stairs, across the deck, stopping in front of the freezer.
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When the house quiets down, it’s easier to tune ‘into a certain frequency.’ You know the way a radio dial turns? Dialing ‘through the hissing and howling until you make out a voice . . . and then you find your friend’s voice.’ –Little Bee
This is the way I hear you.
I’m in awe of your world and the way you describe it.
kass- thank you. i can’t tell you how much i appreciate you telling me this. the world that holds me steady is a fairly quiet world. and yet, it keeps me tuned and i think- is there anyone else out there who feels this?
oh boy oh boy oh boy, i could scarcely read beyond the zoo nobody goes to and that’s the way all of the nobody’s want it. oh boy ♥
mm- i love the way you show me a new way of seeing things. yes, that is zoo montana! and that is montana. how many times have we thought to go see a movie, only to not go in because “there was a line” (six people).
Indeed, a good book! Little Bee.
I love the way you think.
kathleen, thank you! so good to hear someone doesn’t think i should connect my dots a little more. and little bee! i loved the language and voice in the book. the perspective. the book gave me new things to consider- such as the little line about how she got her name. how we don’t notice the flower until a bee lands on it. and so….what else is like that i am not noticing?
I’m not sure how I found you…wandering the net…oh, I guess it was through geodes images…trying to distract myself from not feeling well. And there you were with a poet’s soul and, what grabs me most, stories to tell. How I love stories. Thank you!
joyce, nice to meet up with you. i always have felt that geodes have a connecting force….they bring us together. i hope you are feeling better and thank you for the kind compliment. come visit us again!