Wounded Bird

My friends, you may wonder at my choice of names for my blog - or not - but I will tell you anyway. For some reason, whether it's the way God made me, or because I grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father, and am wounded myself, or whatever, I am drawn to the wounded, both people and animals. My dear departed sister called it "the wounded bird syndrome." My niece, her daughter, has the syndrome also.

I have thought that if I ever started a blog of my own that I would call it "Wounded Bird". To my wonder and surprise, the name was available on Blogger.

We have never had a pet by choice of breed. Ours have always been strays, who just showed up and seemed nice, and I felt sorry for them, and took them in. At this time we have only one pet, a mixed-breed dog named Diana. She was found by the animal rescue folks with an arrow in her leg. Of course, they put her picture in the paper, and, of course, she came to live with us, when she was about a year old. She is now is pushing on 11 years old and the poor dear has glaucoma, and is pretty well blind in one eye. It costs the earth to keep her in glaucoma medication, but there you are; once you give your heart away to an animal, you are responsible.

At one period, we had one dog and six cats. We were the cat people of the neighborhood. We have no cats now, because Diana hates cats, I mean HATES them. When she came to live with us, we had one cat, Boy, and each time the cat went into the yard at the same time as Diana, he was up a tree. He died from kidney failure not long after Diana came to live with us , but I think it was from stress. It was quite unfair, because Boy was here first.

One evening, a huge stray tom cat got into our yard and fought with Diana. My husband could not separate them, and it was a fight to the near death of the tom cat, which my husband had to finish off. So goes life in the jungles of south Louisiana. In the end, Diana was pretty beat up herself, so you see that she really hates cats. It was Diana or the tom cat. One of them was not going to make it.

Early in our marriage, my husband rescued a mother flying squirrell and her three babies from their nest in a tree which was being cut down. We kept them in a hamster cage in our tiny apartment for a couple of years, until I had enough of the smell and the mess, and I convinced him to let them loose on a college campus with lots of trees and space. It was quite exciting when we'd let them out of the cage, because they FLEW.

You now have a small part of the picture of "the wounded bird syndrome" in action over many years at chez Mimi, as applied to the beasts of God's creation.

I know I'll make you breathless with suspense, when I say that in my next post, I will go into the "wounded bird syndrome" in action with human beings.