After sweeping more than 2,000 square feet of hardwood floors..

Me: “So now we just have to shave all the dogs and cats.”
Shane: “Or! We could laminate them…”

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It’s just shy of 7:30 am on a Monday morning, and barely light. But I’ve already had breakfast and been buried in transcription since about 6, and can’t wait to finish up today and get busy on the house. Getting up early and back into the full swing of work and focus is always a rough stretch after so much time away. But last night when we curled up for bed in front of the living room fire it was lightly snowing, and there was a strong sense of home and rightness after being restless and in various stages of transition for so long.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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Got caught in traffic for almost two hours outside of Dallas, but once we hit the Oklahoma border at sunset, the road opened up and I felt immediately at home. For all the places we go and love and miss when we return home, I cannot measure the comforting and very alive and idyllic feeling that rushes back when I sense that the landscape is shifting back into the undulating, dry and golden desert and mountain west against anything else.

Posted by tee in wandering
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When I was a kid, ours was an unofficial half-way house for just about every species of wild and stray animal known to the eastern seaboard. My parents were divorced, I was an only child, and despite the trouble I’d get myself into I’d spend hours wandering the neighborhood, finding and confiscating wayward animals while my mother worked long hours at two jobs to put enough food for the two of us on the table.

Three or four times a month she’d come home to find the newest resident: a mangy, old dog sprawled out on the kitchen floor, two newborn kittens in a box in the bathroom, a canary, even an injured jackrabbit on the back patio. Each time, day or night, she’d pack me and the pet du jour up in the car and haul us down to the animal shelter to drop the animal off in the cages outside with a note. She hoped my repeated heartbreak of watching them disappear in the rearview mirror would eventually slow me down.

No such luck.

Today, 25 years later, my fiance, Shane, and my two kids are battling the same furry challenges my mother battled back then – except now I’m the mom and I don’t have to bring them back if I don’t want to.

Three years ago we were in good shape with just one great dog, Kenya, a one-year-old lab mix who made the move with us from Nevada to New Mexico. Not long after we arrived, however, I started poking and prodding and pouting at Shane to go down to the local shelter and pick up an adorable four-month-old puppy I’d found on Petfinder.com. It was a strategic move: if he went, he couldn’t later blame me directly for the offense. I would keep him quiet through his own accomplice.

Less than a week later, Nanook was making himself very much at home.

A year later I tricked Shane into stopping by the shelter “just for a look”, promising that I could walk out of there empty-handed and be just fine. A couple of hours later, we were unpacking a frisky, three-month-old black kitten and tossing him into the fray of our home. That brought the tally to two adults, two kids, two dogs and a cat all under one roof – and as freelancers and homeschoolers, that meant all under one roof at the same time.

I remained unfazed. On a Christmas road trip back east I had to be dragged away from countless strays and shelters and kids with kitten boxes in front of big box stores. While we waited for a tire change in rural Oklahoma I spotted a woman standing by a sea of metal cages on the roadside. In them was an irresistible collection of puppies and dogs of all sizes up for adoption, and on a perfectly-innocent walk to pass the time I just happened to find myself in front of those cages and falling in love with an eight-month old Alaskan Malamute.

I had every intention of letting him ride on my lap for all of the remaining 400 or so miles home, but Shane’s look of mild panic as he looked over at me and realized what was happening was, at least this time, enough to thwart any covert adoption operations. Close call.

But less than a week after we returned home I was sneaking through the front door with a tiny gray and white kitten, and a whole lot of fast excuses: He wouldn’t let me leave! There were so many cats there he had to fight for his life! Poor thing, he was living in squalor!

So now that makes two of everything – adults, kids, dogs and cats – for a total of eight of us living in one 2,000 square-foot space. We are now eligible for an ark application.

Anybody who has owned multiple pets knows that having four of them is, for better or worse, not much different than having four extra kids. We’ve chased down the dogs as they took off running after mischievous coyotes. We’ve explained to the drive-through guy that he could still hand us our food despite all that barking and carrying on in the back. We’ve swatted the cats down from the top of 10’ tall window curtain rods, and watched them land in the pile of dishes on the counter. We’ve fed one of the kittens with a syringe when he was too weak to walk, and cleaned his leaky rear end with somebody’s shirt we pulled out of the hamper on a moment’s notice. All of this we’ve handled with a reasonable amount of finesse and dignity and a minimum of grief for our things, lost and broken.

But now the unspoken I-told-you-sos are rolling around in the air more and more frequently as we house-hunt for a new place with a bigger yard; one with landlords willing to take on all eight of us. Good-sized homes with property are already few and far between in the area, and even those we find that allow pets are duly tested at the four-pet level.

So this is it for me, I think, as my pet habit has gotten us into one jam too many. As everyone around me stands tapping their feet and raising their eyebrows, waiting for me to figure out how to get us out of this one, I’ve been forced to submit to the unthinkable: having my proverbial pet tubes tied.

And I’ve agreed, I’ve made the deal. And I’ve done it with surprisingly little regret, though I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve really learned my lesson this time or because even that’s a reversible procedure.

Posted by tee in de la vida, favorites, kids + pets
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