Frank's Gift

Frank is our cat. One of our cats. He is orange. He drools and sounds like a pigeon when he purrs. He likes to sleep on our bed, even if it means getting kicked many times. He will simply cling to the blanket and pretend all is well.

Just after I put lunch on the table, Gunther started barking. This isn't unusual - Gunther barks at every neighbor that has the audacity to drive a car in or out of their own drives, at every jogger or walker that passes by, and at every truck that drives through our neighborhood, even if it doesn't come anywhere near our HOUSE. But this time Gunther was barking at Frank.

Frank was outside, on the deck, asking to be let in by scratching the glass door and meowing silently. But when I went over to let him in I realized that... Gunther wasn't actually barking at FRANK. What he was REALLY barking at was the thing that Frank and just dropped a centimeter from the door to the porch. A small, furry, dead.... something.

Actually, not so small. Not a mouse. Bigger than my fist. A mole or a vole. I didn't want to look to closely.

I don't remember screaming, but Nick looked at me and said "Mom, why did you make that noise?" And I realized that I was going to have to be very, very brave. Because Steve was not home. And if I didn't clean it up, Gunther was going to eat it.

Once I tried to carry a dead furry thing to the bushes from our house, but I only got halfway there with the thing resting in a pile of paper towels before the weight of it in my hand became too much and I screamed and waved my hand and danced around as if I had just discovered it there, suddenly appearing in my wad of paper towels.

So I took a different approach. "Stay here!" I ordered the boys. Then I walked across the kitchen and out the door to the garage, so I wouldn't have to step OVER it. In the garage, I found what I was looking for - the snow shovel. I then opened the garage door and walked around the house and up the porch steps to the dead furry thing.

All three of the boys were standing at the door, their noses pressed against the glass. It actually took a couple of tries to get the dead thing on the shovel because I didn't want to SMOOSH it, and it kept moving and flipping over, leaving little dots of blood on the deck. But finally I got it. I then walked down the steps the the backyard, and then over to the bushes, where I flung the dead thinginto the brush (which has so nicely sprouted up from where I cut it back this spring.)

I wiped blood off the snow shovel and hung it up, and then went back into the kitchen, where the boys were standing, staring at me while Gunther tried to eat their chicken nuggets.

I was proud of myself, but I guess I wasn't as sturdy and calm as I thought. "Mom," Nick asked later, "why were you crying out there?"