leticia

My alarm is set for around 8:30 at the moment. It is more like 6:30. About twenty minutes ago, soundly asleep and content, I hear dire wails from outside. In a tone of despair and heartbreak, my mother is shouting, "Remus, no!" "Remus, no!" Over, and over. Whatever Remus is doing, he is apparently also avoiding her. Remus is a dog.

So I drag my carcass out of bed and go outside. There she is, standing on the front porch and wailing in horror that Remus might have caught a bird. (I think her brains are crumbling in old age. It's not like the cats never catch the blasted birds and if she doesn't like the fact that umptity birds and a menagerie of household predators might have some run-ins, she should stop feeding the damn birds and luring them to the waiting maws of cats and dogs.)

I don't know if Remus had caught a bird or not. He was certainly fascinated with something in the grass, but when I went out towards him and called him (hopefully sounding more firm and less my-firstborn-child-is-dead) he came to me. Nor, when mother finally found shoes to put Remus on the leash (silliness - I take him out to the leash barefoot all the time, and I was /holding him/ at the time - still, she didn't ask me to, and I wasn't sure Remus deserved to be on the chain. It's the only effective punishment method to train him, and she'll diminish its effect by putting him on just because her nerves are shot.)

So when I got out to the grass patch where Remus had been so intrigued, I saw no dead bird or anything else, so I don't know if it was small, dismembered, eaten, or escaped. Or, perhaps, never existed except in Mother's grief-wracked imagination.

But, such a SPAZ. She's broken up dogfights in the past - what's the use of cowering on the deck shrieking "Remus, no!" in banshee tones because he might have a be-damned bird, instead of heading out to him and dragging him away from whatever? She, however, is back asleep, able, apparently, to go from 'freaked' to 'drowsy' in an instant. I, on the other hand, who was dragged out of bed by horrific wailing, got a fair shot of adrenaline, and thus, am awake.