The Lillie household is under a curse, I tell you. We have the worst luck with pets! Seriously an animal has to have powerful ju’ju’ to survive in our domicile.
There was Cain and Abel our guinea pigs (named after the event). We had a perfect summer home for them under a covered porch until a freak sideways rain filled their cage with an inch of water. Apparently guinea pigs don’t like water. Cain used Abel as a stepping stool and drowned him in a sawdust puddle. No good deed goes unpunished as they say. Cain boiled to death in his own juices about a month later during a freak heat wave (apparently guinea pigs also hate intense heat).
Then there was Solange Rapheala Chirptwix our blue parakeet. She was a good bird who met her demise when one of our foster kids accidentally knocked her cage out a second story window.
Willowmane Chartreusian was a beautiful calico cat who died when a piece of wood fell off the wood pile and clocked her in the squash.
After that there was the cockateel. I have blocked that hateful bird’s name from my memory. He escaped from his cage one day and spent four days mocking me from the maple tree in our back yard. It was Indian summer when he escaped. He lived until frost and then became a cockateelcicle.
Penelope, one of our favorite cats, was carried to our home by one of our neighbors who found her flat as a pancake on her porch steps.
Then there were the animals we couldn’t keep because of their freaky behavior. There was the dog who wouldn’t stop jumping over our heads. There was the dog who wouldn’t stop barking.We gave her to my sister. She never did stop barking but lived to a ripe old age. There was Benny Black the Jesus Cat who slept in the trash and then rolled in our arm chairs.
I can really only remember one animal that lived for any length of time. Buffy, the cat, was seventeen when she was given to us by a couple who were on their way to the mission field. I think they only gave her to us because they thought she was living on borrowed time anyway.
Buffy loved prayer. I could kneel down in any room of the house to pray and within a minute Buffy would be there jumping on my back and curling up in the hollow of my neck to “pray” with me. She lived to be twenty-one.
We now have two Maltese and they seem to be in it for the long haul (I think they have the ju’ju’).
We also had four rabbits. You may remember my post about the end of the world bunnies from a few months ago. I say had because it would seem the bunnies lacked the ju’ju’.
We had four lion head minis. They chewed their way out of the first cages we had for them. So my wife decided to downsize from four to three. I guess she thought that three rabbits could not possibly chew as much as four.
She traded two of the lion heads for a Netherlander mini. That “Little Bunny” (the name we gave it) didn’t chew. It was great we could let it roam the house and it was just such a love.
The other two… they seemed to think that when we gave away their brother and sister they had to make up for it. My wife bought them a new cage which they promptly began to chew to bits. One of them also discovered that there was great power in his hind legs. He learned to kick open the door of the new cage. Jackie Chan had nothing on this bunny. I rebraced the door twice. But one day I came home and found the brace pushed back, the door broken open and the two lion heads gone never to return.
Little Bunny didn’t seem to mind getting all the bunny attention my wife had to give though. What a cute thing she was.
Yesterday when I left for work she was sitting in her cage right as rain. Two hours later when my wife got back from the dentist she was a bunny board, a stiff! She didn’t have what it took to survive in our house 😦
Now you may remember that I said I was keeping a close eye on these rabbits because when they started to multiply that would mean the famine was on the way. I wonder if their untimely demise means the recession has been called off! 🙂
Reinventing the We'll 