Where I Belong

I've often thought that my poor parents must have felt I'd been dropped on their doorstep by evil gypsies.  My mother was not an animal person.  She would never have mistreated an animal, but she didn't particularly want them around her, either.  She would just shake her head when I would lay in the grass for hours and watch snails crawl up my arm...I wanted to know how they moved when they had no feet...or collect pocketsful of sowbugs.  (Pill bugs, roly-polys...I know now they are sauer bugs.)  After doing time with goldfish and a canary, I was allowed a cat and a dog.  The dog was named Blackie, but my mother never called him anything but Dog.  My father bought my first horse when I was twelve.  Mother was so opposed to this she left home for a week.  He had taught me to ride years before...it was the one sport we did together.  I think he owned only one sport shirt in his life, and wore a suit and tie even when we went to the beach.  When I would go riding in a wash (gully, river bed) not so far away, I would catch and bring home "horny toads," lizards that look like mini-stegosaurus.  I brought so many home that my father finally had a special outdoor habitat built for them, probably because Mother didn't want them anywhere near, and who could blame her?  Daddy would bribe me to put on a dress, promising to take me out to dinner or to a favorite aunt's house...nine times out of ten it didn't work.  Mother was thirty-eight and Daddy in his forties when I came along unexpectedly, and they must have wondered how this misfit cowbird was left in their nest.  The fact that they humored me is to their credit.  My love for "all things great and small" is now fulfilled.  I'm where I belong.