Animal
September got away from me! When I wrote my last post, I thought it was the 29th and that I had one more day of September. I kept thinking about which prompt I would use for my last post. I didn’t realize, until this morning, October 2, that it was October. I mean, I knew… but I didn’t know. That is all to say that even though it’s now October, I’m going to do one last prompt for the September Writing Challenge.
Yesterday my kids didn’t have school, so we decided to go to the zoo. I forgot about one thing… charter school field trips. Ugh. We pulled in the parking lot and discovered we were not alone. There were children. Everywhere. At the zoo! Can you imagine?
(Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but I still found myself running away from name-tagged school children in matching polos at every corner).
Animals are great. They’re kind of like relatives. I don’t need any of them living in my house, but I enjoy spending time with them once in a while.
If I were to have an animal in my house again, I would want it to be a cat. In fact, I really want a cat. I miss the Colonel fiercely. But any time I start daydreaming about having a cat, I repeat the phrase, “Cat hair and kitty litter! Cat hair and kitty litter!” and it fixes me right up.
At the zoo, one of the cutest animals, in my opinion, is the Arabian Sand Cat.
Scotty rarely goes to the zoo with us, so pretty much any time I go to the zoo, I send him a picture of the Sand Cat and say “I want one!”
The other day my friend Lynsie sent me a picture of a buck-toothed hyrax and said she found her spirit animal. I found the hyraxes and sent her a photo, pointing out that they have lovely double chins. Lynsie and I? We feel it. We do.
I may have found my spirit animal yesterday. This gorilla was just laying there, munching on snacks, living his best life. And I was like, “Yes, friend!”
Then I saw the meerkats, and even though they are one of my favorite animals of all time, I know they are not my spirit animals. They are overly active and busy for no reason. They are up and down and up and down… burrowing with no purpose other than that’s what they think they need to do. I look at them and think, “I know people like you! Y’all make me tired.”
Then there were the Titi Monkeys. Look how the four of them intertwined their tails.
I wondered if that was something that just the monkeys at Hogle Zoo do, or if it’s a behavior of their species as a whole, so I looked it up and found that it is the species. They intertwine their tails for social purposes and to regulate their body temperatures. I thought that was pretty cool.
For many of the animals, it was a day for lounging about. Even the zebras were ready for the weekend.
This morning we woke up and decided to go to the zoo again. Being a Saturday, we were free from field trip crowds. We got there just after 9:30 while the weather was cool and the crowds were small. It was delightful! And I was happy to find my spirit animal in the same place as yesterday, still going strong. He just… gets me.
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