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June 22nd Home Again

After arriving home yesterday, I continued the clean-up from my drive shy of 6,000 miles in twelve days, I dragged my body out for an afternoon hot humid five-mile run. Soon, after showering I continued to do laundry. I put on the television in hopes some sport would be on. Yet, to no avail of tennis, figure skating or anything I’d particularly like to glance at as I did paperwork, cleaned and so forth was showing. I then turned on PBS-kids, “Arthur” was on.

I sat down on the living room couch for a minute or two; then stared away from the low-volume of the show I’d put on. I realized as I stared at the now pristine empty spaces that our pets would reside outside some hidden cages. Or the eventual requests they’d look to me for a snack. Or the look of ‘You’re late with our organic kale and apple mom’. It’d began to sink in evermore so that those requests were no longer there. I pondered as to how our oldest would deal with the emptiness. She’d been here early last January 2025, when two of our three pets were still alive. Albeit one was supposedly on her way out in the summer of 2024. I prayed that our older bunny Nibbles would get to be present in September 2024 for a brief visit before our eldest’s senior year of college would begin. Then as she’d visited all three of our pets, two bunnies and one guinea pig still were not just viable life forms, yet spunky as ever.

The next prayer for miracles then would be, could Nibbles make it till our youngest would be home for Thanksgiving, Because the oldest of our three pets was actually her bunny. And Nibbles would be ten years old or so just as Thanksgiving had arrived. That’s old for a Lop-eared bunny. Arthritic as Nibbles was, she still did nearly all the bunny things, although wobbly and slower in hopping fifteen to twenty feet across the toweled floors for ‘snackie’ and dinner time with her sister, a non-biological half wild bunny Aspen and her brother a guinea pig, Cocoa Bean. They truly were a family.

As I reflected that second afternoon of summer, I wondered how our youngest was fairing with the now empty spaces in our living and dining rooms. Too, what effect would it have on our oldest, as I was still adjusting to the empty spaces myself. The last five or so years appeared a flash. Yet the remnants of loss and change were clearly available to me in the present. I could hear the echo of my foot fall or the adjustment of my somewhat new one cup coffee maker that now sat atop a wooden rolling three drawer wicker stand I’d purchased just in case one of our children needed it for their nearby college home. Little did I plan on one being nearly 3,000 miles away.  The cute little rolling wicker stand now sat nonchalantly against the dining room wall where the one pet table had been covering Nibbles’ cage. Everything else looked as though we’d never had pets, let alone scampering bunnies and a strolling, strutting male guinea pig who’d been always ready to ‘woo’ a furry female, even out of his species, unless too large to uh—you know. That thing.---Jody-Lynn Reicher

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