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I finished unpacking a box today.
One of the things I have decided to do is to (finally) get stuff straightened up around here. Because, if I don't do this, then when my time comes to go, I will leave this unbelievably distressing task to my kids.
There's just so much stuff. And a lot of it is still in boxes, from one, two, or even three moves ago.
One of those boxes has been in the corner of the kitchen, for fifteen years.
You read that right. And it's not the only one, sitting out in plain sight, waiting for me to set aside time for it, all the time we lived in this house.
The top layer was mostly mementos from our china cabinet. Boy, was that layer hard to get through.
The middle layer, and most of the bottom, was a set of stoneware dishes. Our first set, if I recall correctly. Unused for all those years, while we collected thrift shop Corel. I also found a huge ceramic stein that Robin painted for me for my birthday in 1981.
And, inexplicably, a business sized envelope that contained...an owl pellet.
That one threw me for a loop. It took several minutes just to figure out what the hell it was -- a few tiny bones, a small lump of fur, and unidentifiable clumps of...dried gunk.
Why an owl pellet? Why would she save...
And then it hit me. This was also from the early 80s.
We had been going to George Sarratt's house for D&D games for a while, and he'd told us about how he'd found his totem animal (Raccoon). This was different from his chosen totem image, the Thunderbird, which he always wore around his neck. He saw Raccoon looking back at him from the mirror one day. Totem animals, he told us, choose you. And that got Robin wondering what hers might be.
One night, when we were visiting Natalie and illicitly spending the night in a reserved common room at her dormitory, Robin awoke in the wee hours. Where a lamp was sitting on an end table, she saw instead a large great horned owl. Only for a few seconds. When the vision passed, she managed to convince herself that it was a dream, or an hallucination. Surely not a totem animal. She couldn't possibly be associated with the Owl. She'd done her reading; owls were stupid animals.
While we were driving back to Omaha from that visit, she noticed something and asked me to pull over. When I did, and backed up to the right place, we found a dead owl by the side of the road.
I've been on a lot of roads, and seen a lot of roadkill. Not once before, nor since, has any of it been an owl.
Robin still rejected this message. I teased her, asking if she needed a live owl to come to her. She acknowledged that, maybe, that would be a strong enough message.
Only a couple of weeks after that, I was walking home from collecting an unemployment check (at this time I was not very far from enlisting in the Army), when I saw a small owl in the snow. It was alive, but did not seem well. At least, it didn't attempt to fly away. Other people were around; none of them knew anything about owls. One of them did have a cardboard box, though. I took it home.
Once in the warmth of our house, the owl seemed to perk up a bit. I learned to wear gloves when handling it. We tried to identify its species, but with only an old encyclopedia set to work with (this was before the Internet), we didn't get very far. We surmised that it could have been a very young great horned, but that was completely the wrong season for that. Of course, with our lack of experience, and lack of complete resources, we were probably completely off the mark.
Of course, I did tease Robin about this whole thing. She had to acknowledge that Owl had come to her.
We kept that bird in our house for about a week. It got better, but it refused to eat anything I offered it. Everything, that is, except for one dead mouse that George trapped and saved for us, assuring us that he had no poisons in his house. The bird snapped that tidbit right up.
And, not long afterward, yakked up an owl pellet. Like they do.
And Robin saved the pellet.
I wanted so badly to tease her about this tonight.
Instead, I poured some scotch, and wrote about it.
We released the owl that night, for a couple of reasons. Mostly because it seemed to be doing much better, having warmed up and eaten, and the weather outside was warmer too. And secondarily, we had learned that, as a raptor bird, the state required a license to keep them. We didn't have the money nor the training to get a raptor license. Kind of a pity. We'd gotten used to each other. It never tried to attack us, it would perch on my gloved hand when approached. Robin held it a couple of times, too.
But it did hang around our house. We heard it, often.
She collected owl imagery ever since that day.
I'd really like to hear owls around here.
One of the things I have decided to do is to (finally) get stuff straightened up around here. Because, if I don't do this, then when my time comes to go, I will leave this unbelievably distressing task to my kids.
There's just so much stuff. And a lot of it is still in boxes, from one, two, or even three moves ago.
One of those boxes has been in the corner of the kitchen, for fifteen years.
You read that right. And it's not the only one, sitting out in plain sight, waiting for me to set aside time for it, all the time we lived in this house.
The top layer was mostly mementos from our china cabinet. Boy, was that layer hard to get through.
The middle layer, and most of the bottom, was a set of stoneware dishes. Our first set, if I recall correctly. Unused for all those years, while we collected thrift shop Corel. I also found a huge ceramic stein that Robin painted for me for my birthday in 1981.
And, inexplicably, a business sized envelope that contained...an owl pellet.
That one threw me for a loop. It took several minutes just to figure out what the hell it was -- a few tiny bones, a small lump of fur, and unidentifiable clumps of...dried gunk.
Why an owl pellet? Why would she save...
And then it hit me. This was also from the early 80s.
We had been going to George Sarratt's house for D&D games for a while, and he'd told us about how he'd found his totem animal (Raccoon). This was different from his chosen totem image, the Thunderbird, which he always wore around his neck. He saw Raccoon looking back at him from the mirror one day. Totem animals, he told us, choose you. And that got Robin wondering what hers might be.
One night, when we were visiting Natalie and illicitly spending the night in a reserved common room at her dormitory, Robin awoke in the wee hours. Where a lamp was sitting on an end table, she saw instead a large great horned owl. Only for a few seconds. When the vision passed, she managed to convince herself that it was a dream, or an hallucination. Surely not a totem animal. She couldn't possibly be associated with the Owl. She'd done her reading; owls were stupid animals.
While we were driving back to Omaha from that visit, she noticed something and asked me to pull over. When I did, and backed up to the right place, we found a dead owl by the side of the road.
I've been on a lot of roads, and seen a lot of roadkill. Not once before, nor since, has any of it been an owl.
Robin still rejected this message. I teased her, asking if she needed a live owl to come to her. She acknowledged that, maybe, that would be a strong enough message.
Only a couple of weeks after that, I was walking home from collecting an unemployment check (at this time I was not very far from enlisting in the Army), when I saw a small owl in the snow. It was alive, but did not seem well. At least, it didn't attempt to fly away. Other people were around; none of them knew anything about owls. One of them did have a cardboard box, though. I took it home.
Once in the warmth of our house, the owl seemed to perk up a bit. I learned to wear gloves when handling it. We tried to identify its species, but with only an old encyclopedia set to work with (this was before the Internet), we didn't get very far. We surmised that it could have been a very young great horned, but that was completely the wrong season for that. Of course, with our lack of experience, and lack of complete resources, we were probably completely off the mark.
Of course, I did tease Robin about this whole thing. She had to acknowledge that Owl had come to her.
We kept that bird in our house for about a week. It got better, but it refused to eat anything I offered it. Everything, that is, except for one dead mouse that George trapped and saved for us, assuring us that he had no poisons in his house. The bird snapped that tidbit right up.
And, not long afterward, yakked up an owl pellet. Like they do.
And Robin saved the pellet.
I wanted so badly to tease her about this tonight.
Instead, I poured some scotch, and wrote about it.
We released the owl that night, for a couple of reasons. Mostly because it seemed to be doing much better, having warmed up and eaten, and the weather outside was warmer too. And secondarily, we had learned that, as a raptor bird, the state required a license to keep them. We didn't have the money nor the training to get a raptor license. Kind of a pity. We'd gotten used to each other. It never tried to attack us, it would perch on my gloved hand when approached. Robin held it a couple of times, too.
But it did hang around our house. We heard it, often.
She collected owl imagery ever since that day.
I'd really like to hear owls around here.
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