Driving out on Wendover Road today when I saw this sign at a street corner: LOST COCKATIEL.
You don't see that one every day.
(Plus I had just seen a bumper sticker that said MY PARROT IS SMARTER THAN YOUR HONOR STUDENT. It's been a birdy day.)
It reminded me of my favorite lost-pet story: When I was a little kid in Georgia, the folks across the street from us had a pet python. We discovered this when one of them came over to our house to notify us that they had lost their pet python.
A day or two later, some guys came to that house to deliver a sofa.
Guess what they found.
My mom can still see the delivery guy sprinting from the house, faster than Carl Lewis.
Add your lost-pet stories below. Points taken off if your dog ran off to rescue a little boy from a well. That wasn't your dog. That was Lassie.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Flying the coop
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
I have two...
First is my own story. I had a cat when I was a little girl that "disappeared". I later (as an adult) learned that my dad had seen her in the road near our home and assumed she was dead. After 2 weeks of crying and calling for her, she showed back up very skinny and beaten up and with a broken tail, but very much alive.
The second is in honor of your cockatiel story. My high school best friend had a very tame cockatiel that escaped out the door one day and was gone. There was an occasional spotting by a neighbor over the next few days, but no one could catch him. Then weeks and months passed and winter came and went and she just assumed that he was dead or hopefully maybe someone else had caught him and was keeping him safe. Then one day a friend of her sister saw a cat about to pounce on something in his backyard and interceded and guess what it was? You guessed it. He was missing all his tail feathers and was pretty jittery, but almost one year later he was back home.
When I was 6, my family went on a two-week Disney vacation. A day or so before we were to depart, my ingenious hamster Cupcake escaped her cage, as she often did. However, we were unable to find her before it was time to leave, so we left ample food and water and hoped for the best (I think my parents were hoping they would not come home to a dead, stinking rodent in the walls of their house). When we returned, we didn't find her right away. It wasn't until that evening, while mom was doing the piles of laundry when our dearest Cupcake was located. Mom was putting the clothes from the washer into the dryer. She reached her hand in a pillowcase to pull it right side out when she felt a wet, furry ball...it was the beloved hamster...and miraculously, she had survived the wash cycle and appeared no worse for wear. It sounds preposterous that a hamster could survive the wash and spin cycle, but we figured she must have had some kind of air pocket in the pillowcase.
I, too, had a lost hamster. It had been missing for about 2 weeks. My sister went to put on a new dress that my mother had bought for her the previous week. When she pulled the dress from her closet, the entire chest area of the dress had been nibbled away.
AHA! The hamster must be in this closet!
We began to pull everything out of the closet, but still could not locate the missing rodent. Finally, when we pulled her economy-sized box of Kotex(TM) from the closet, we found a hole that had been dug into the back of the box. The hamster had tunnelled inside, ripped open one of the pads, and had made itself a quite cottony and comfy home.
“Good thing you didn’t try that one on, Sis.” I couldn’t resist.
Grew up on a farm in what is now Huntersville on Gilead Road. I had way too many cats when it came time to move to Charlotte as we had sold the family home in 1991. At that time, my mother was living about a half mile up the road and said she would take the one cat I was going to leave behind. She was named Gabriella, but we all knew her as and she answered to Mama Cat. She was totally an outside cat. The day after I left her at her new farm, she was not to be found. We all figured she had just moved on. Three days later when we made the final check of the old farm before the buyers moved in, out from under the back steps comes Mama Cat to great us. A bit thin, but otherwise unharmed and purring. She had walked over a half mile and crossed two creeks (one of them McAlpine creek) and made her way back to her home. I had heard of cats doing this before...but she crossed two creeks-and McAlpine is about 12 feet wide at our home. Taking that as a sign, she was moved to Charlotte and indoors with us. She lived out the remainder of her years as a quite happy indoor cat until she passed in 1999. Never understimate your pets ability to find HOME.
My childhood pet, a Cocker Spaniel, had a habit of disappearing for several days at a time. Mom & Dad searched all over our small town for him, but never found him during these times. He always came home, however, proudly bearing a newly-killed rattlesnake, which he would drape carefully over the back steps, and wait for us to notice and praise his new trophy.
About 20 years ago, my Granddad was on some property he owned near Easley, and heard two of the neighbor's dogs going nuts out in a field. He went out there to find they had surrounded what turned out to be a 11'4" burmese python. He killed it with a bush ax - they had his picture with it in the Greenville News. It was obviously an escaped pet - the python is not indigenous to South Carolina - but no one ever came forward to claim the remains.
Post a Comment