In a life filled with an endless progression of small pets, the thing I yearned for throughout my life was a dog. When I was a child, we had a little bulldog pug mix named Lola, who attached herself to me in the gardens, and with whom I had tea parties. Then we had a […]
Many years ago, when we made the decision to move to our town for the fine school system, I was heavily pregnant with twins and anxious to get settled. We already had two children, and anticipated more, so we were in search of lots of space. We bought, despite our misgivings about the work it […]
When we first moved to Barrington, and my daughter Katie was in elementary school, I felt compelled to join the PTO. I couldn’t just join a committee. No, I had to volunteer the fill the one spot no one seemed to want. The President was moving out of town, and someone needed to step in. […]
Some years back, my family van was named the “Squirrel Taxi” by the daughter of a friend. While it lacked flashing red lights and any sort of medical insignia, she associated it (as did most of my town) with the pickup and transport of orphaned or injured animals. As do many rehabilitators handling mammals, I […]
There are many diseases that ravage little wild bodies. Of them all, I think the cruelest ones are those that attack the central nervous system. Raccoons are susceptible to both rabies and distemper, two central nervous system diseases that are virally spread and highly contagious. Rabies is always fatal. Fatal and vicious in the sheer […]
The cook, a fierce Vietnamese woman who never went far without her meat cleaver, was a figure of much authority and not insignificant fear in my childhood. It was to her that all the other staff members deferred, and her word was law. My father had determined early on, though he never explicitly stated it, […]
