Animals in Mom's Life

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

When my brother and I were little, we dreamed of becoming known throughout the country as biologists, well, or in extreme cases, trainers. And you need to be our mother in order to fully realize and feel the whole dizzying abyss of this seemingly innocent childhood dream.

My beloved mom went through fire, water and copper pipes, accompanying all our feats of arms in the field of biology - this most interesting of the sciences. Sometimes my mother wanted us to become stuntmen, conductors, in the end, cavers, but not people who deal with animals! And only with age did I begin to understand what a heroic woman our mother is …

- Olezhik! Are you sure this is, and not a deadly viper? - she asked, gathering all the remnants of consciousness into a fist, when a happy son, with the grip of a young bull terrier, twisted some creature from the reptile family in front of her eyes.

But that was just the beginning. Then the animal turned out to be lodged in some kind of box, which, after a short skirmish with our parents, we hoisted between the table and the sofa on the terrace. Naturally, the next morning, from the sweet embrace of Morpheus, we were literally ripped out by my mother's hysterical cry:

- Who let this stuff out ??? !!!

A family that has jumped out of their warm beds, who is in what, then observes an oil painting: a mother, balancing on one leg in a high chair, is trying to pick up the other leg for herself, and a snake, fearfully crawling into the corner of the terrace. Our poor nurse was saved from falling from such a height only by the heartbreaking cry of his brother:

- Don't move !!! You will crush him !!!

The final blow of the gong. In the red corner of the ring, the trainer-dad is pumping out his dear wife, in the blue one - my brother and I are trying to drive the snake that escaped to freedom back into the box.

And at this time, a worthy replacement for my brother was growing up in my face. More or less developed animals were still too tough for me, so I had to be content with insects. In one of my regular trips to the attic on a scientific expedition, I discovered there a cocoon hitherto unknown to the world community. Naturally, greedy for all kinds of sensations, my creative imagination immediately outlined the further actions: this something drags into the room, is taken under strict observation and, at the moment of the birth of a new life, my name is assigned to it. This was done much faster than even thought. The cocoon was placed in a jar of mayonnaise, on which it was written in clumsy handwriting:"

It was interesting to watch him only for the first 40 seconds, since this shaggy something was not going to show any signs of life yet. So, in anticipation of fame, one could go out into the street, where they were already bored, things left for a while: a jump rope, a rubber band and multi-colored crayons. The twilight bliss was broken not even by a cry, but by some kind of guttural sound bordering on those that are no longer accessible to the human ear. Obviously, it was our mother. Whirling into the house, I froze at the door … Poor mom, with undisguised horror, looked at the wall, on which sat a half-thousand little yellow spiders, who were staring at her with the same genuine interest. Mom couldn't even speak. Pointing her finger in their direction, she muttered some incoherent phrases, of which it was only possible to understand: "Uuubrrrt, clean up, spiders, spidersiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!" Ha! As if it were so easy to do. I tried to drive this army back into the jar, but as soon as this visual aid on Brownian motion noticed me, it immediately scattered in different directions. Naturally throughout the room. Then my mother for many months, doing the cleaning in the house, carried out on a scoop, in order of matured and fattened, and did not become my path to world fame, spiders. And they, in turn, accompanied each cleaning procedure by jumping out from under the sofa or dropping down on a thin cobweb from the ceiling. Than they drove our mother to despair, and us to puppy delight. How wonderful Mom could quickly mix in space in those minutes!

It's time for me to move on to larger animals. So the jackdaw Galina appeared in our house. She loved chicken eggs to be hand-fed and various shiny objects that she stole without a twinge of conscience right from under her nose. Yes, she also loved to take out of the pack of her father's cigarettes lying on the table and break them into several parts. For this, my mother respected her. But when the terrible secret of the disappearance of a dozen teaspoons, mother's brooch and an aluminum mug was revealed, Galina's friendship with her mother came to an end. The bird was set free in peace. However, the animal did not understand the noble gesture from the mother's side and continued every morning to wake everyone up with its croaking, similar to the sound of a pretty hooked horn. And when her Field Kitchen appeared on the street, again in her mother's incarnation, Galina threw herself at her feet and demanded her lawful breakfast.

Over the years, Mom became more tolerant of my and my brother's quirks. This is how the nameless toads, newts, goldfinches and the marsh turtle Aristide Ternip Dode Ida appeared in the house, who once bit my finger, mistaking him for a thick pink-cheeked earthworm. To which my mother calmly remarked: "Have you tried to feed her more often?" In addition, at different times we lived: clawed frogs, lizards, steppe turtle Esmeralda, hedgehogs, shrews, hares … Not counting all the usual cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats, mice, parrots, fish, canaries and others them.

Mom resignedly endured the neighborhood with these all kinds of crawling, jumping, flying and just running creatures. And when, once in February, the swallowtail butterflies appeared from the cocoons into the light of God, deceived by the heat of the central heating batteries, she even liked it. Although I cannot say with complete certainty that she liked it to the same extent when the marble Great Dane Graf dragged her by the edge of his coat through the snow across the yard, and she could not do anything with him, or when she found newts in her own slippers who left the aquarium without permission.

Many years have passed since those distant cloudless times. My brother and I, despite the complete absence of the educational process, still managed to become adults. But the love for animals, which, in spite of everything, was instilled in us, and not without the efforts of our dear mother, we carried through all the years of growing up. Perhaps this love helped us to become relatively kind and harmless people. Now in our house, zoological life beats with a less intense fountain. And as a memory of the past, dear to the heart, when her children were children, every morning our dear mother is greeted on the doorstep: 2 dogs, 2 cats and a cat, a whole flock of daddy's pigeons and my wonderful blue rat Louis Philippe. All of them demand bread and circuses at this moment. So, mom's adventures continue!