Let's call today's category NATURE.
Soon after we got to our cabin, my sister Joon was heating up a bottle for the Beignet. She began screaming, so of course we all started running, only to find out that Joon had cooked a ladybug. Yes, she COOKED IT. In the microwave.
Just as she began to burst into tears, she shouted, "It's alive! It's alive!" in much the same manner as Gene Wilder yells in that one movie. Evidently, the ladybug had survived the millions of megawatts of rays, or else Joon's hysteria had resurrected it from its nuclear grave. At any rate, Joon cooked the spots right off it, and she set it free outside the front door.
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Our first night in the woods, we were all sitting around watching television in the living room, when Joon began squealing (I think all my nature stories start with Joon screaming). She pointed frantically at the porch, and we all looked over (in unison, like at a tennis match) and saw a face looking in the window. Lest you think we were in danger of being chain-sawed to death by a mask-wearing psycho, let me assure you that we were only in danger of being cuted to death by a mask-wearing bundle of fur, that is to say, a raccoon.
I myself am no fan of raccoons, on account of they have hands like a human, and that freaks me out. But a little family of raccoons, when they are safely on the other side of a locked door, can be sort of ... tolerable.
The raccoons visited us every night, and every night we would throw out little scraps of food for them to eat. I'm sure this violates every kind of park policy, as well as any sort of natural selection theory, but we didn't care.
As we stood at the window one night, watching a raccoon eat a cracker for the seventeenth time, I said to Joon, "Joon, we are some city folk, for sure." Because most other people we know would be shooing the raccoons or (in some cases) taking shots at them with pellet guns, but there we were, three seconds away from naming them.
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My mom is the one who discovered the gigantic rainforest spider. It hung over the back porch, and every day I checked to make sure it was still there. On the one hand, any spider is bad in my book, and should be executed immediately; this one was the size of my big toe and would probably have made a feast of it. On the other hand, as long as it was still hanging on its web outside, that meant it hadn't come inside, so ... six is half a dozen, Joon would say.
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My mom came out of the bathroom and my dad went in. When he came out, he asked her, "Did you notice anything unusual in the bathroom?" She answered in the negative, and he replied, "What about the daddy longlegs hanging over the toilet?"
This exchange would have put me off going to the bathroom altogether, except for the fact that I have the world's smallest bladder. I did, however, make it a rule to check for bugs each and every time I had to go. That was a lot of times, and I only saw a spider once, on the last day.
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Also on the last day, there was a worm in the bathroom.
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One of the nights we were there--I think it was Wednesday--a possum joined the raccoons on the porch. I have never seen a live possum before; in fact, I may not have seen a possum with its guts on the inside before.
Take it from me, possums are ugly. Like raccoons, they have hands like a human, only theirs are pink, and therefore much more freaky. Through no fault of their own, they always look mean, even when they are eating Cheerios on your back porch. And that tail! Yuck!
Still, as we are city folk, we fed it and stared at it, and pretended it was cute.
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We went to this place called The Homeplace, where my mom tried to befriend a sheep. The rest of us watched, privately
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We saw a bald eagle flying over a lake.
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We saw deer at the side of the road. The other people in the car were far more enthralled than I was.
And that's our week in Nature Photos.
1 comment:
You know, I can send you some photos to add to your blog so they won't be just word pictures.
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