You know how this works, but as always, a gentle reminder:
Pooties are cats; Woozles are dogs. Goggies are dogs, too, and moggies are cats. Birds...are birds! Peeps are people. PWB Peeps are Pooties, Woozle, Birds People. No trolling the diary.
- If you hate pootie diaries, leave now. No harm, no foul.
- Share any and all pootie/woozle photos or issues that you would like .
- If you have health/behavior issues with your pootie or woozle, feel free to bring it to the community. We just may have someone whose experience can help.
- Whatever happens in the outer blog STAYS in the outer blog. This is a place to relax and play; please treat it accordingly.
- There are some pics we never post: snakes, spiders, creepy crawlies, any and all photos that depict or encourage human cruelty toward animals. These are considered “out of bounds” and will not be tolerated.
- There is no such thing as stealing a photo around here, but if you would like a pic from the comment threads, please ask the poster. He/she may have a copyright to those pics. Many thanks!
- It should not need to be said, but ANY/ALL photos that imply or encourage human violence against an animal will be considered verboten! Whether it is “comedic” or not
Previous Neighborhood stories
Jack’s Pet
Larsson Helps Out
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------—
It was early summer, while Grover was on a fishing trip – well, on his way back, actually – that he found that goose, or she found him.
He was passing a farm and he saw a sign that said, Fresh Eggs and Vegetables, so he stopped. He left the car open for air because of the fish, and went to look at the peas and strawberries. It was then he noticed some geese wandering around.
“What kind of geese are those?” he said. Not that he was any connoisseur of goose breeds—it was just that he couldn't remember seeing any like that on a farm before.
“Those are rats with wings,” said the farmer.
“Oh,” said Grover. He didn't ask any more questions.
He was half way home from the farm when he heard the noise coming from the back seat. He pulled over and looked, and in between two brown bags of vegetables was a goose, and she was nudging
an egg around with her bill. Grover would have been the first to admit he was no metallurgist, but that egg looked to him like about eighteen karat.
“Geeze Louise,” Grover said.
The goose blinked at him a couple of times and then settled down as if she'd been on a nest. Grover drove on home. He got a ticket for driving too slow on the highway—because his mind was working too fast—but the trooper didn't notice the goose, so he figured he was still in luck. He had a pretty good idea how he'd manage to pay the fine.
By the time Grover got home with Peggy—that's what he called her—he had some other pretty good ideas too. It turned out Peggy could do three of those eggs a week on average, and she didn't eat any more corn or drink any more water than any other goose. She liked ice cream—Grover found that out when she reached over and took the top off a cone he had—and of course she liked the gourmet kind from the place that carried Kiwi Madness and Pumpkin Shortcake, but Grover figured she earned anything she got.
She settled into the house like a regular pet. She even sat on Grover's lap sometimes, especially if he had popcorn. She had a nice personality, and she didn't honk or nip much. But after a few weeks Grover realized he had a problem.
In any town, there are just so many places you can sell gold, and you can go to each of them just so many times with a solid fourteen-karat egg (Grover had over-estimated) before you start getting funny looks. After Grover had made the home rounds a few times he started thinking about Chicago, but he knew he'd eventually run out of places there, too, so he pondered for a while.
One day when he was out walking Peggy he passed one of those places with tie-dye clothes in the window and he looked inside just out of curiosity. What he saw was a place full of people buying five-inch leather earrings and grass bracelets and black nail polish and battery-operated flashing T-shirts that said, Kiss My Attitude.
“Peggy,” he said, “do you know what that is? That is a boutique. One of the best ways ever invented for parting the general public from their hard-earned or somebody else's. And you and I are going to open one. We'll call it Peggy's Golden Goose. How do you like that?”
Grover swears to this day that Peggy could smile, and she did. “Well,” he said, “we are going to sell goose hats and goose aprons and goose umbrellas and mugs with little geese in them that you can't see until you've drunk your coffee. We'll have goose T-shirts and goose vacuum-cleaner covers and lamps with goose necks and geese on the shades. We'll have chairs with little wooden geese on the backs. We'll have goose-down jackets and goose-feather pillows and goose futons, and goose stationery and goose pens and candy in little goose tins and goose-liver paté—“ And then he caught Peggy's eye and he realized he'd let himself get carried away.
“Aw,” Peggy, he said. “No way would I do that. Ever. I swear.” He turned into the ice cream place on the corner and bought her a dish of Chocolate Gooseberry Ripple to make it up to her.
“You see,” Peggy, he said, “the main thing is we'll have a special glass case right next to the bone china geese and that's where we'll put the golden eggs, one at a time, and we'll sell one when somebody begs. And we'll get a good price, too. And nobody will ask who the vendor is.”
Well, that's what he did, and he turned out to be a better shopkeeper than he ever would have thought himself. He was doing a bang-up business, especially in goose socks and goose-head ski caps as the weather got cooler, until the day the DNR man happened to come in and get a look at Peggy in her special day-time nest over in the corner. She just loved to be in the shop with Grover, and the customers liked it when Grover said, “Yeah, that's Peggy herself.” The DNR man had a second look and then he gave Grover a little sermon about Peggy.
“What do you mean I can't have this goose?” said Grover. “She's just like family, only not as messy.”
“You can have a domestic goose,” said the DNR man, “but you can't have a Canada goose in captivity, and that's a Canada goose.”
“Nuts,” said Grover. “I got her from a farm.”
“Look at that black neck,” said the DNR man. “Look at that chin-strap. I would love to see this farm.”
Well, Grover tried to show him the farm Peggy came from, but, wouldn't you know, there was a sold sign on the gate and some big houses with synthetic half timbers were going up along a new road called Royal Maplebog Lane. There wasn't a goose in sight. There weren't any maple trees, either.
“Gee, what a surprise,” said the DNR man.
“Peggy's tame,” said Grover. “She can't go off on her own.”
“She's wild,” said the DNR man. “She'll do a lot better on her own.”
“Can't she have one last cone before she leaves?” Grover said.
“You shouldn't be feeding her ice cream,” said the DNR man.
He took Grover and Peggy down to the lagoon and watched while Grover put Peggy into the water and gave her a goodbye pat. Then he took Grover home, gave him a ticket, and told him to straighten up and fly right.
It wasn't long after that the geese started to go south, and then the weather turned sharp and Grover started brooding. He took to keeping shorter hours in the boutique so he could watch for skeins of geese going over.
One evening in early November he had an idea. He put a bowl with two scoops of Caramel Apple
Surprise in it out on the back stoop. Then he crossed his fingers. The next morning the ice cream was gone.
Grover was just bringing the bowl inside when a skein of geese came over, flying low and honking like a traffic jam, and a golden egg fell right out of the sky and clipped him back of his left ear.
When he came to, he just broke down crying for a while. Then he went downtown to open the shop. But he left that last golden egg at home on the dresser.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------—
Thank you for reading this far! I’m trying to supplement a very small retirement income by earning something from my stories. IF you like my stuff, please consider helping me out a little. My PayPal account is here. Thank you!