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  From our breakfast table, we watched the antics of squirrels desperate to breach the ramparts of the bird feeder in our Gone With The Wind-like front yard trees. Occasionally we ate breakfast in our great room instead so we could see the backyard version, this time played out over our ponds. We went through a series of supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeders. If you’ve ever gone through this exercise, you know there ain’t no such thing. However, we found one that almost worked. It had a domed hood of clear plastic over a smallish feeder that dangled about 18 inches below the dome. The squirrels would stage assaults for hours, getting braver, smarter, and more pissed off as time wore on. Ultimately, several squirrels managed daring leaps from side branches and acrobatic maneuvers down the dome and under it to clutch the feeder in triumph. Their joy was short-lived, however. When they would finish eating, to a man the squirrels would jump straight up toward the nearest limb. Oops. Plastic dome. Squirrel in pond. Squirrel frantically swimming. Squirrel rapidly exiting, looking like an embarrassed long skinny drowned rat. Never did we see a repeat attempt by a squirrel after the dome-to-water dunking.

  Besides the squirrels (and an occasional rat), the animals we saw most frequently were birds, an astounding variety of birds. We saw cranes, egrets, and other bayou fowl. I loved the ringed kingfisher, in his dress whites and bow tie. Cardinals, robins, blue jays, and red-headed woodpeckers entertained us. Red-tailed hawks chased smaller, frantic birds through our yard and their prey would crash into our windows. Time to look away, kids. Once a hawk stunned a dove, which fell into our pond. It was still alive, so we carried it into our game room and wrapped it in a towel, leaving it on the ping pong table. Yes, we shut the doors to keep the dogs and cat out. When the dove revived, it revived with a vengeance and it took a full family effort to herd it back outside through the wide-open double French doors. Eric cleaned up the mess it left behind.

  At night, the power lines behind our house were a mammalian superhighway. We could only see their silhouettes, but identified them by their shapes as possums, rats, and raccoons. Sometimes we’d hear them on the balcony outside Liz’s room, scritching and scratching. A time or two we heard them up in the attic and inside the walls. Thank God they found their own way out ’without help from Lone Star Rodent Removal. (At least I didn’t smell the evidence if they did not.)

  For a home office goddess like myself, the view is one of the perks. And as a girl raised on Ranger Rick, I couldn’t have asked more of Meyerland.

  12 I will not digress here into a diatribe against the naming conventions of Houston streets, other than to say it is the norm for streets to suddenly change names for no apparent reason.

  13 Large swamp rodents that look like giant rats, but with rounder bodies. Say it with me: ewwwwww.

  ~~~

  Chapter Twenty-six: Good Karma or Bad Karma?

  When we were living at Annaly, isolated in the rainforest on St. Croix, six large dogs and two cats (and one short-lived pig) made perfect sense for security and pest control. However, when we moved to the house in Houston with a normal-sized backyard, we had to downsize our pet population. You will recall that we took three dogs and one cat14 to Texas. The total dog weight was still close to three hundred pounds, though. Count up the pounds with me: Cowboy, a mutant yellow lab the size of a pony, weighed 125 pounds; Layla, a sweet boxer and Cowboy’s “girl,” weighed 65; and Karma, a clingy German shepherd obsessed with Eric, weighed 85.15 Yowza.

  That first summer, the dog poop got insane. I cannot adequately convey the horror of standing amidst fly-covered piles of poop on our deck while cooking steaks at the grill. Imagine a Cambodian minefield, and you might get close. Even with the kids picking up two to three times a week, it is bad when you have nearly three hundred pounds of pup. We knew that three big dogs were too many and one had to go. That one, we decided, was Karma, since Layla is Marie’s dog, and Cowboy is Layla’s boyfriend and Susanne’s bestie.

  For her swan song, Karma came down with a serious case of hereditary mange. It normally occurs in a dog’s first year of life, if at all, but whaddya gonna do, she got it at two. It had to be cured before she could be outsourced. The mange started with swollen bloody feet and turned into hairless, weepy patches all over her body. We kept Karma in the house for nearly two weeks—which is worse than it sounds, as she was never housebroken. She’d lived up at Annaly as an outside guard dog, after all.

  We initialized a regimen: wash her feet in hydrogen peroxide, goop her up with Neosporin, and dope her up with Benadryl. But it didn’t cure her, and the stench from her wounds and her bathroom habits finally forced us to kick her back outside and take her to the vet, which, I kid you not, cost close to a thousand dollars by the time we were through. All of this just to get rid of her. The vet kept ordering tests without our permission that we didn’t want [to pay for], and on the day of her third treatment, Karma vomited, so they gave her a seventy-dollar shot in case it was an allergic reaction—even though she hadn’t been allergic to the treatment the first two times. We felt robbed.

  Layla had also had serious hereditary mange, you may recall. Sadly, it appears the two breeds most susceptible to autoimmune disorders are, according to our very well-paid vet, boxers and German shepherds. The vet asked if we by any chance had a rottweiler, too, as those are the third most susceptible. Bullet dodged: we had one—Callia—until we left St. Croix.

  As we were dealing with Karma’s mange in Texas, a year after we’d left St. Croix, Annaly was finally under contract. That left us looking for homes for two dogs, not just Karma: Jake16 was the last dog standing at Annaly and was in need of a forever home. He got lucky and was adopted (hopefully permanently) by our house sitters.

  Encouraged by our success, we advertised Karma online in Houston. This nice young couple with a puppy came and got her that day at about 5:30. They really loved her; it was so great. By 9:30 they’d left a message asking to bring her back, and when we woke up the next morning she was in our driveway in her kennel, looking tired and embarrassed. Poor Karma. Apparently, she whined at night. Shocking that a dog would do that on the first night in a new place. So, we tried again.

  One day later, a very large older woman came to visit Karma, and it was love at first sight for both of them. Karma was singing opera for her within five minutes, which is one of her happy tricks. The woman wanted Karma for companionship and protection. I repeated “she is not house trained” over and over, and the woman swore that was OK, she would take care of her. She said she had a big walk-in shower to bathe her in, which is great because Karma loves water. I crossed my fingers and loaded Karma in the truck, but I knew it would be OK. (Yep, I could feel the good karma.)

  Don’t tell anyone, but I cried a little when she was gone.

  14 It will surprise no one who is familiar with Eric’s track record with cats that Eric “gave Tiger away to a really good home”—which is grownup talk for “foisted her on a six-year-old kid playing in his family’s front yard, then drove away like a bat out of hell.” Just kidding.

  15 Eric’s daughter Marie called her Karmela, as she seemed to want to be Eric’s wife, too.

  16 I would love to say Jake did a fine job as a guard dog for us that last year, except that we got robbed to the tune of $50,000 on his watch, so I think I’ll just say instead that he enjoyed his time there and didn’t tear the place up too much. Hrmph.

  ~~~

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Home Office Mates

  Dogs, dem.

  Juliet shared an office with the dogs and me in Houston. Of course, she did not permit herself to be photographed in the same frame as them. She wanted me to point out that Ninja does not have the honor of sharing office space with the rest of us. Juliet may be a cat, but she can be a real bitch.

  ~~~

  Chapter Twenty-eight: RIP, my fine-feathered friend.

  I am a planner. I plan and schedule and plot, much to the delight of my engineer/cyclist husband, who loves to live by a plan. Even more, he loves for me to ma
ke a plan and then for us both to live by it. And what he loves most of all is when the plan I make and live by includes a healthy dose of us bicycling and swimming together. I believe a plan is a structure within which to make reasonable changes, while Eric sets his plans in cement. Obviously I am right, so there usually isn’t much of a problem.

  But I did not plan what happened to us in the Good Old Summertime Classic, a sixty-nine-mile bicycle ride along some of our most favorite roads for cycling, anywhere. The bike route runs in and around Fayetteville, Texas, including the tiny old town of Roundtop. We had trained for it. We had talked about it with joy and reverence. Eric even accidentally went to get our packets a full week before they were available for pick-up (don’t ask).

  The night before the race, I developed a PMS17/hormonal migraine. Because it was the middle of the night, I took one of my gentler migraine prescriptions, hoping that this pill plus sleep would be all I needed. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to the mother of all migraines. I caved in and went for the elephant tranquilizer. Unfortunately, I was so nauseous from the migraine, I couldn’t eat. My husband, a man of immense patience and even greater kindness, suggested we stay home.

  But we had made a plan, so I got in the car anyway under the theory that I had no idea now how I would feel in two and a half hours. Although I kinda did know, and just didn’t want to admit it.

  I should have listened to my husband.

  On the way to the race, driving in the dark, the unthinkable happened. I had my head on Eric’s shoulder, sweetly sleeping (make that “snoring and drooling under the influence of the elephant pill”), when he let out a tiny swear word. Actually, I believe it started with an F, and was preceded by the word “mother,” and that his voice blasted through my cranium and echoed madly inside my impaired brain.

  “What happened?” I screamed, heart pounding, hand clutching throat, eyes sweeping the road for signs of the apocalypse.

  “I hit a cardinal.”

  OH MY GOD. HE HIT A CARDINAL.

  Since the time he could speak, my husband has proclaimed himself a fan of the Chicago Phoenix St. Louis Arizona Cardinals football team. His screen saver at work has always been a giant Cardinal head logo, until very recently when he finally switched it to a picture of us, under teensy-tinsy little applications of subtle pressure from me. He watched their playoff game in 2009 at 2:00 a.m. through a webcam picture of our TV on his laptop in his hotel room in Libya. He collects cardinals and Cardinal paraphernalia and insists on displaying them prominently in our bedroom.

  Back to ear-splitting expletives and wife-under-the-influence. “Honey, I didn’t feel an impact. Are you sure you didn’t miss it?” I asked.

  “They’re awfully small birds,” he said.

  Ahhhh, good point. We drove on somberly. We arrived at the race. I stumbled off to the bathroom. When I came back, Eric was crouched in front of the grill of our car. I joined him, confused. He held up a handful of tiny red feathers.

  I swear it was the drugs, but I burst out laughing. “You, you of all people, you killed a cardinal?”

  He glared at me as he picked the biggest and brightest of the small feathers and tucked it reverently into the chest strap of his heart monitor. “I’m going to carry this feather with me in tribute, the whole way.”

  So we got on our bikes: me, wobbly, cotton-mouthed, and somewhat delirious; Eric, solemn and determined. This, the ride for the cardinal, would be the ride of his life. Sixty-nine miles to the glory of the cardinal.

  I made it all of about two miles before I apologized. “I’m anaerobic, and we’re only going twelve miles per hour on a flat. I’m really messed up from these drugs.”

  “You can do it, honey. We came all this way. Now we’re riding for a higher purpose.”

  I gave it my best, I really did, but a few miles later after a succession of hills where going up with a racing heartbeat was only slightly less awful than cruising down with a seriously messed-up sense of balance, I pulled to a stop.

  “I’ve never quit before, but I can’t do it today, love.”

  A beautiful male cardinal swooped across the road in front of us. Eric bit his lip. “I understand. Do you want to flag a SAG [support and aid] wagon?”

  “I can make it back if we just take it easy. I’m sorry, honey.”

  My husband treated me like a princess that day, but all the excitement had drained out of him. This race we had planned for was not to be. And a teacup-sized bird had sacrificed his life in vain, because I had overdosed on Immitrex and ruined the plan. The waste of it all, the waste of a day, the waste of a life: it was hard to overcome. But Eric tried; I’ll give him credit for that, the man really tried.

  That night, after we did a make-up ride on the trainers while we watched We Are Marshall (interrupted occasionally by Eric’s sobs, because the only thing worse than a dead cardinal is a dead football player), I pulled our sheets out of the drier and brought them into our room. Eric—wearing his new Fayetteville Good Old Summertime T-shirt—helped me put the warm, clean cotton on the bed.

  As we hoisted the sheets in the air to spread them out over the mattress, a tiny red feather shot straight up toward the light and wafted down slowly, back and forth, back and forth, until, pushed by the soft breeze of our ceiling fan, it landed on the pillow on Eric’s side of the bed.

  Above: Actual cardinal feather on Eric’s pillow.

  Steeling myself for the worst, I shot a glance at him to see if he had noticed. I did not exhale. Maybe I had time to brush it off quickly? Too late—he was staring at the feather. “Is that damn bird going to haunt me for the rest of my life now?” But he smiled.

  “Probably. You did senselessly murder a cardinal, Eric.”

  And he laughed.

  17 Technically, I suffer from PMDD—Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder—but try to say, “I’m feeling PMDDy” or “I’m really PMDDing right now.” Yeah. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

  ~~~

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Crackhead Possum Moves In

  One day, shortly before noon in broad daylight, Eric and I came upon a strange sight. Weaving down the middle of our street toward us, its eyes glazed and fixed, its feet stumbling, came a possum. Not just any possum, but a big, scraggly possum. A possum that looked like an overgrown rat sick with radiation poisoning and male-pattern baldness. I kind of think they all look that way, but anyway, it was an ugly possum.

  This possum was confused. Possums, or “opossums” as those with more class than me call them, are nocturnal creatures. Either this one suffered from jet lag (having just arrived on a direct flight from Mumbai, possibly?), or it had mistaken day for night.

  “Poor possum. He needs to go home and go to bed. Do you think there’s something wrong with him?” I asked. I popped a handful of macadamia nuts into my mouth and concentrated on their salty yumminess.

  “Maybe she doesn’t have a home,” Eric said.

  “Maybe he did have a home, but his possum wife kicked him out because he never shut any cabinets,” I said, nodding my head.

  “Maybe her possum husband booted her azz because she writes a blog about his fictitious gender-confusion issues and Ironman underpants,” Eric suggested, his eyebrows arched into points.

  “Or maybe he’s on crack, and he’s jacking the neighborhood cars for loose change,” I said. We live in a nice neighborhood, but our cars have been broken into twice recently, so it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

  So we carefully dodged said possum and pulled into our driveway. But we couldn’t get it out of our minds. Later that day, Eric, ever the softie, took a bowl of dog food out into our front yard. The possum stumbled drunkenly to the bowl and had a meal. When it was done, Eric moved the bowl to the back yard. Theoretically, our two hundred pounds of doggies live there, but they are far too spoiled to eat outside. The possum dined in peace.

  That night, we heard noises out back. “What’s that?” I whispered. My stomach twisted with nerves. I moved closer to Eric, my nose pra
ctically under his armpit, which gave me a comforting whiff of Irish Spring body wash.

  Scritch-scritch-scritch-scritch. Something was scratching the back wall of our bedroom. Something possibly out of a Stephen King movie, or worse. Something that would drag us from our beds and eat our brains, leaving behind only the empty skulls and the words “Juicy Couture” scrawled in our blood across our deck. I dived in for another huff of Irish Spring.

  “I think our crackhead friend is trying to move in,” Eric said.

  It took me a moment, but I realized he meant the possum. “IN, in? Can he get in?”

  “No, she won’t make it. I’ll let the dogs out to chase her off.”

  “NO! You fed him, we can’t let the dogs out there. They’ll kill him.” I should have seen this coming.

  We debated, but in the end we decided to leave it alone. Our casa es su casa, I whispered. Feliz navidad, poco opossum. Call it restitution for the frogs.

  ~~~

  Chapter Thirty: Pillow Fight

  A photo of sweet JuJu, who usurped the dog pillows and enjoyed the fire. The giant canines were too scared of the slightly unbalanced cat to challenge her.