This Life Is in Your Hands by Melissa Coleman

Author:Melissa Coleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Paradise

Heidi and Lissie with snow fort (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

Young animals were everywhere in the spring before Mama’s leaving. Our remaining milk goat, Swanley, named after the goat in the book Heidi, had a kid, not a billy, luckily, that we called Turnip because she was white like her mother. She had soft noodle legs and liked to butt her head into my hand, the way she butted into Swanley’s udder to nurse, so you could feel the bumps where her horns would be.

Mama and I were walking down the path to the Nearings’ when we saw a fawn with its mother in the woods next to the path. They stopped to watch us over their shoulders, the small one with white freckles across its back and dark wet nose and eyes. Suddenly the mother flicked her ears as if to say, “Come on,” her tail flashing white as they leaped away, cracking sticks through the woods.

“When you see a deer, that means something new is coming,” Mama whispered. “We saw a baby so maybe it means we’ll have a new baby, too.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Will you be able to take care of it?”

“Of course,” Mama said. “That’s what mamas do.”

“Really?” I felt like asking. It seemed a challenge for Mama to take care of herself that spring. The business of readying the farm for summer overwhelmed her body, which longed to remain in hibernation mode. Checkout times had been more frequent, and fasting was often the culprit, as she resorted to juice diets for energy.

Then Papa found six baby mice when cleaning up the woodshed and brought them out to us in a wood box. I peered in to see a pile of small brown tear shapes with pointy noses and eyes sealed tight as peapods.

“Where’s the mama mouse?” I asked.

“She must have gotten lost or hurt,” Papa said. I held the box against my stomach so I could show Heidi. She looked in, then up at me, that sweet smile of hers flooding her eyes and twisting her mouth into a bow. We gave them goat’s milk and water, but had to push their noses into the milk so they would drink. The first thing I did when I woke the next morning was look in to check on the mice in the box next to our bunk. Some were making cheep-squeak sounds, but two of them did not wake up. We tried to get the others to eat lettuce, oatmeal, and more goat’s milk, but they just crawled to the far corner of the box. The next morning there were no more cheep-squeak noises. I sat next to the box for a while, swallowing at the lump in my throat, then took the dead mice to bury them with the others by the compost heap.

When I found a young bird that had knocked itself out against the front windows, I was afraid it would die like the mice if I helped it, so I left it next to the greenhouse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.