Lambs

One fall day, my parents brought home two little lambs that we named Cookie and Dolly. They were little babies with wobbly legs and wooly, white hair. My father built them a little pen under the stairs behind the garage but my sisters and I couldn't stand the idea of them being left alone in the dark and cold weather. They ended up living in our newly finished basement, much to the dismay of father. These little lambs were the luckiest lambs that ever lived.

It is still a little horrifying to eat lamb today as my father used to make jokes at the dinner table as we cut into our lamb chops that we were eating our two precious friends.

Backyard Grief

This is a bit I wrote for a class a few semesters ago. I began this blog as a sort place to collect my memories and I think this story is a good place to start. Enjoy. 

Every morning after a particularly windy night my two sisters and I, with baby Faithe hanging from my neck, scoured the yard for the baby birds that had fallen from their nests during the night. I am not sure what it was about my home that birds found so appealing but there were always numerous nests in odd places. These mornings were traumatic and emotional. If the bird was still alive, we carefully placed the broken baby back in its home––after properly naming and loving it, of course––and faithfully checked up on it every hour. The mother bird never seemed to notice. If the baby bird was dead, we spent the day giving it a solemn, appropriately tragic funeral. 

Our family home in Dammeron Valley, Utah––abutting as it did on one side public wilderness and on the other my Grandpa Staheli's farm––seemed to us girls to swarm with poor, broken birds during those years of our childhood and early adolescence. For this reason, rescue missions––not only for birds but any small, unfortunate animal––were not an uncommon activity in my childhood. McKenzi, as the oldest sister, led the missions while Tess and I followed faithfully. We marched onto my grandfather's lush, green sod farm and sabotaged his gopher traps and defended these lovable (to us) creatures from the odd assortment of mongrel dogs that also found a home on the farm. When Grandpa Staheli found out what we were doing, Mckenzi sweetly suggested, “Grandpa, why don’t you just ask the gophers to stop ruining your grass?” My family home and Grandpa's sod farm were in the center of his 300 acre expanse of land. Secluded from the world, our backyard––and at times also the larger farm––was for us an endless adventure, a fight against nature's harsh decrees and laws of death.

I remember after one particularly frightening rain storm, my sisters and I found a beautiful baby bluebird that was still alive, but just barely. We created a nest for it in an empty plastic cookie container and attempted to nurse it back to health. We named it Whisper. We sung songs and muttered prayers for Whisper’s recovery; but still, one hour later, Whisper died. This was the most traumatic and tragic event any of us sisters had ever experienced, and we set about our funeral routine in sorrowful and downcast mood. Mckenzi divvied up the assignments. Hers was to create a casket, which she did beautifully from a Quaker's Instant Oatmeal box. She painted and colored the box with white and blue letters and sparkly stickers. Tess' job was to prepare the headstone. She used a piece of red sandstone upon which she wrote out a eulogy in white chalk; however her tears kept washing the white chalk away. I, as the youngest, able-handed sister, always got stuck with the job of digging the hole in the flower bed while Faithe, my infant sister, crawled around me. This all being done, we all draped ourselves in white sheets, and thus began the procession to the backyard garden. Tess uttered the eulogy: “Whisper, your song will always live in our hearts. Goodbye.” Between sobs and tears, we placed Whisper the bluebird in the hole, then gently filled in the earth, the red sandstone marking the place for all to see.

These memories of rescue missions for lost baby animals and funerals for little defenseless birds and gophers play through my mind at the start of Tess’ funeral 9 years later. I am sitting next to McKenzi, and Faithe is next to me. We are all grown up now, all except Faithe. McKenzi, now twenty-one-years old, whose large round glasses have been replaced with contacts and her freckles have become a feature of her beauty. Faithe, no longer a chubby infant but now a nine-year old kid, is slender and almost as tall as me with grown up teeth and long hair. But I, now fifteen, still feel like that six-year old little sister. Today we are not crying over Whisper, nor are we draped in white sheets. The casket in front of us is made of polished yellow pinewood, not an oatmeal box. It is engraved with the name Amanda Tess Felt, and covered in floral arrangements rather than painted gaudily and covered in stickers. We are not crying under white sheets; rather, we are silent, our emotions held tightly in check, but we are aware that at any moment we could suddenly be sobbing uncontrollably. My mind wanders back again in time and ask myself what happened to the passionate children we once were? How did we get from there to where we are now?

I remember once, during one of our rescue missions, we found an injured gopher. It had unmistakably been attacked by one of the dogs. I scooped the invalid up in my hands and rushed home to nurse it back to health. Tess fetched my mother’s stethoscope while McKenzi got together towels and a box. We all gathered around the baby gopher with our gear in hand, whom we had named Samuel Gopher, as trauma surgeons and nurses would one day gather around the mortally injured Tess. Tess placed the stethoscope onto Samuel Gopher's chest, and then gravely stated that he was not breathing. We panicked. Tess suggested CPR, since that is what we thought was normally done in a situation like this. She gently placed her finger on Samuel Gopher's chest and I used a straw to breathe into it life giving air. But, after all of our valiant efforts had come to naught, Tess with tears in her eyes, called his death.

And so once again, a funeral is held.

The evening before Tess' funeral, as I stand in line at her viewing, I swallow my tears and hug countless people with no faces and no names––no faces and no names because my mind is somewhere else. I am attending, not the funeral of Tess, but the funeral of Samuel Gopher. None of this is real. I turn to my left, and peer down at my sister, who for a moment is not lying in a bed of white down but rather an Instant Oatmeal box. I close my eyes and hold in the sobs, the sobs of a six year old girl crying over a dead gopher.

The smell of tuna fills the air as the electric can opener works its way around the small Chicken Of the Sea tin can. We walk to the red barn for our weekly cat rescue mission. My grandfather always kept a few kittens in the barn in order to keep the mice population down, but they only lived for a few weeks before they became coyote food. So, my sisters and I took it upon ourselves to adopt them––much to my grandfather’s frustration and my father’s dismay, who did not like us feeding the feral cats with the tuna fish that was meant for our sandwiches and Tuna Helper. We snuck into the barn while our Grandpa and uncles were looking the other way, lured all the kittens into our arms with the tuna, and then ran home to hide in the upstairs room we all chose to share. 

Our bedroom had blue and white striped wallpaper, three girl-size beds built into the walls with yellow bedspreads and two closets. One of these closets had a door that led into an attic. It was filled with fiber-glass insulation that made us itch. After we brought the first batch of rescued cats home, we decided to turn the attic into a home. We gathered blankets, cardboard and leftover carpet to lay on top of the insulation, then draped some blankets over the insulation in the walls. McKenzi hung christmas lights while Tess and I drew pictures for the walls and Faithe chased the little kittens. We secretly sheltered the cats until my parents, hearing meows coming from the attic, became wise to what we were doing. But still new furry friends weekly continued to make a home in our attic, along with heartbreak that came with caring for the vulnerable and defenseless.

Tonight, still standing in line at Tess' viewing, the lump in my throat and the blank space in my mind grows larger as I deal with emotions that threaten to overwhelm me at any moment. Today's funeral procession is longer than a line of three girls and an infant. It never seems to end. The big stake center is still too small for the hundreds of people inside. The draped white sheets of my girlhood have turned into black dresses, tights and heels. When did we grow up? Nature turned her attention away from kittens, baby birds and gophers to my just turned 18 year old sister who become one of the vulnerable creatures she had so stoutly defended as a child. Each year, the levels of grief we felt for the little wild animals began to diminish as we grew out of childhood into adolescence and finally adulthood. Each year, fewer baby birds were rescued and fewer kittens found a home in our attic, culminating today in a grief too large to swallow. But still, I think that nothing compares to the pure unsullied emotion of a childhood, crying over a dead gopher or bluebird, and I long to return to that time of innocence with my sisters and to feel as freely and innocently as I once did.