MELVIN
When our four children were in their preteens and early teens, my husband and I moved, with them, into the country, about five miles from town.
We moved into a house that had been my aunts and that we had traded her for our house in town. The house was larger than ours in town and met our needs much better. And it sat in the middle of forty acres.
Besides, I was a country girl, raised in the country, loved the country and all that went with it.
We proceeded to acquire animals. We had a horse who later had a colt, another horse, named Billy, that had once been a cutting horse. He was nearly thirty years old. We had chickens and rabbits and ducks (lots of ducks, our son, Steve, learned how to hatch eggs in an incubator and we had every kind of duck you could imagine, starting with four baby ducks that came our way at Easter time).
For the children, I felt that living in the country was a great learning experience. We grew many of our own vegetables and they learned to eat, fried, just about anything. I fried our green tomatoes and zucchinis and squash and cucumbers and anything else that would sit still long enough to be sliced and fried. (So much for all those healthy vegetables).
The children had all the pets they could ever want and regular chores to keep them busy and teach them how to care for things. They had the freedom to roam the forty or so acres around our house and to climb up into the barn full of hay and daydream. They had a tree house, of sorts, in which Mary, our oldest, learned to read for the pleasure of it, a lesson she carries forth to this day.
One of our favorite pets was a dog named Toby. Toby came to us in a very round about way. His mother showed up on our doorsteps one day, very hungry and very pregnant. I fed her and she adopted us immediately.
One of the problems we had, was keeping my Aunt Bryant’s small herd of cattle from congregating on our carport each morning. The mama dog took it upon herself to suggest to the cattle, in no uncertain terms, that this was her territory and not a place for their morning get together.
Because she was female and pregnant, we could not keep her and so a friend took her home with him.
About two months later, we went to visit a cousin, who lived half way between our friend and us. Imagine our surprise to see ‘our mama dog’ there with her five babies.
One of the puppies was a male with the markings of a collie. Since we had collies while we were in town, and the puppy reminded us of them, he was immediately adopted by our children. We took him home and named him Toby.
Toby was not as big as a collie, more the size of a border collie, but he was blond, with a white collar and looked, all the world, like a smaller version of our past dogs.
Before Toby came to live with us, we had acquired a black cat. She was given to us by my Aunt Tootsie, who lived not too far away. The cat was half Siamese and a female. As female cats tend to do, she took off one night, looking for male companions and evidently found it because she came back the next day, pregnant.
All of this was at about the time we brought Toby, the dog, home with us. He and the black cat, whom we named Sabrina became good friends. They played in the yard, which had a four foot chain link fence (here again to keep the cattle out of our yard) around it.
When she got ready to deliver her kittens on the back porch, the Sabrina decided that Toby was not welcome in the back yard. She relegated him to the front yard only and would bristle and hiss and rush at him if he dared to set foot in the back yard. Once the kittens were born, there were five, she still would not let him come into her territory. But later, when the kittens began to walk about, she relented and once again allowed Toby free range of the yard and of her family.
One by one, we found homes for four of the kittens, all black, keeping only one, a fluffy light grey kitten with white markings around his neck. We called him Melvin. Melvin and Toby, therefore grew up together in our back yard. They would lie, forever grooming each other or curled into a single ball, asleep.
Toby, although small in stature, would walk up to our four foot chain link fence, gather up his muscles and hurl himself over the fence. Neighbors complained, because in the country, a loose dog is not welcome. But try as we might, we never convinced Toby that it was bad manners to jump the fence and go off visiting neighbors, without an invitation.
Every morning, I drove the children to school. On this one morning, after driving them to school, I returned home and found that Melvin was nowhere to be found. He was about five months old at the time and not in the habit of wandering off.
When the children returned that afternoon, they immediately noticed that Melvin was missing. We all set out looking for him. We searched the house and the barn and all of the other out buildings, but no Melvin. In the evening, we had a downpour, but even the rain did not bring Melvin our from his hiding place.
The next morning, a Saturday, we were sitting around the breakfast table. Everyone had a sad face, all were missing Melvin.
I had a sudden thought. I jumped up from the table and rushed out the door and into the car. I took off down the driveway, which was almost a mile long. When I reached the main road, I made the customary left turn onto the highway. The deep ditches on either side of the road still had a good six inches of water in them from the rain the evening before.
What had brought me here was a sudden recollection of a sound that I heard as I made that turn the morning before. It was a strange sound, as if the motor on the car had hiccupped.
Along the right side of the road, I stopped and got out of the car but there was nothing there. Then I made a u turn and started back along the left side of the road.
All of a sudden, I heard the anguished cry. It was Melvin. Stopping the car, I got out. There, just a few inches above the water in the ditch sat Melvin, cold, wet and very angry, crying his eyes out. He had evidently crawled up into the motor of the car the night before and when we went off to school, had held on until I made that wide turn onto the highway. The centrifugal force had sent him into the ditch on the right side of the road. Somehow, he made it up out of the ditch and to the other side of the busy highway, without being crushed. But when he went down into the ditch on the side closest to home, he could not cross it because the water, in the ditch, from the last night’s rain, stopped him. He, therefore, could not get home. There he sat, the most miserable kitty I had ever seen. He was shivering from the cold and the shock of it all.
I wrapped him in a sweatshirt and dried him off and took him home. Connie and Linda, our two youngest, met us at the door, with the other two kids not two steps behind them. There wee enthusiastic shouts and astonishment as to why I would even had gone to the highway and looked in the ditches.
It is funny how a bit of information will sit in the back of our brains and only come out in an unexpected way. How I remembered that strange sound coming from under the hood of my car when I turned the corner that morning, I will never know. How I applied it to Melvin, only the next morning, I will never know. But needless to say, I did and I was the hero of our family that day.
Later, we moved back to our old house in town. We had to give away most of our animals but we kept Toby and Melvin. They came to reside in our sixty by one hundred foot back yard, fenced in with six foot planks, that Toby could not jump nor could he even see over the top. Nor could I see over the top.
He never quite adjusted to town living and neither did I,but our children did. They went on to become productive adults and though all have an affinity toward animals, none of them ever returned to country living.
As for Toby and Melvin, they lived out their lives in the back yard in town, friends until the end of their days.
Shirley Tracy Price August 17, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment