It started with a skunk

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Have you seen our peacock, George?

George is a beautiful boy with lovely long tail feathers. In the summer. He’s starting to shed them now and in a few weeks all his long feathers will be gone.

If you’re lucky, he’ll open his tail up and show off. And if you’re really lucky, he’ll give you a frontal view where all the pretty colors are. But usually he just shakes his backend at you.

While I admit it is a very fine backside, with fluffy downy feathers, thick quill feathers, and the undersides of the eye feathers, the front is where all the bright colors are and what everyone really wants to see. And yet George persists in keeping his back to us most of the time. Ah well. His feathers, his choice.

People often wonder why we have a peacock. After all, the handful of feathers we get from him each year certainly doesn’t pay for his room and board.

It’s a simple answer. My Grandmother wanted one (well, two, but his fellow peacock died years ago).

George is the most recent in a long line of animals that she’s had.

From a burrow to parrots to monkeys; Miss Elaine has had quite a variety of pets (she’s also had the “typical” dogs and cats, although she took cat ownership to the next level and showed Persian cats).

But the very first “odd” pet – that she remembers – was a skunk.

“When I was about seven years old, my father came home with a baby skunk! I was thrilled, Mother was not. Sally lived in a pen under the hickory tree, and I loved playing with her. I saw other skunks come visit her from time to time. We even used to leave milk out for them! When she was grown, we opened her pen up and she eventually went off with her wild friends.”

While Sally is long gone, we still have the hickory tree that Sally lived under and we still have the steps under which she was found. And thanks to Sally, today we get a peak at the life of a 7 year old farm girl in the 1930s. And a peacock.

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Make memories!