MindSpinner

It is 1997, in a pet shop on Lawndale Drive in Greensboro, North Carolina. We are, at this time, a family of four, all gathered around a display of baby ferrets. We are collectively smitten. We buy one, a little older than the others, lighter colored, one disinclined to bite - a female my daughter names Buddy. A year later we will buy another, a larger male, Mr. Packers.

It is 1999. Buddy wins a prize at the school pet show. We have a picture of her in her proud owner’s arms, wearing a tiny hat topped with a bell. She wins a talent award for retrieving an ink pen. All her life she has absconded with ink pens and hoarded them under her favorite piece of furniture.

It is 2001. We are no longer a family of four. The two ferrets move with the children and me.

It is 2004, in August. We are living in a new house, one of our very own, except, as my son reminds me, it really belongs to the bank. The builder hasn’t got the last register in place over the vent in the living room. Buddy disappears one day. We search and search and find her three days later when I finally think to look in the crawl space beneath the house. I open the door and she comes running into the light.

It is 2004, in October. The ferrets are enjoying a day in their cage out on the deck in the crisp fall air, only come afternoon we find the cage door open and my son’s beloved Mr. Packers gone. My son looks for his pet for days. We still say that maybe somebody found him and is taking good care of him yet. We do not say he was likely killed by a neighborhood dog.

It is early spring 2005. Buddy has lost her hair, the baldness beginning at her tail and finally extending almost all the way up to her shoulders. She is thin and feeble. We think she will die but she doesn’t. She grows her hair back and gains weight, looking almost healthy again.

It is summer 2005. Buddy comes out to play, but she’s too old to romp up the stairs like an animated slinky. She chirps and hops a little and then finds a place for a nap. We talk about the fact that she is very old, for a ferret, and will probably not be around too long.

It is today. The cat slips out of the house, leaving the door ajar. Buddy follows. My daughter finds her lying in the yard some time later, heat stroke in progress. She tries to cool Buddy, tries to get her to drink. By the time I get home from school, life has gone. My son and I dig a hole in the hard clay near our tiny dogwood tree in the back yard. My son asks to be the one who shovels the dirt over the small body, which is wrapped in a square of scrap fabric. He does this as if he is making a soldier of himself, and this shoveling of dirt into a grave is part of the process. Together we lay a large flat rock from the stone path over the grave. My daughter does not come out of her room.

I throw away the sleeping bag that hangs in the ferret cage, along with the small table cloth my daughter laid Buddy on when she had done for her ferret all she could do, a table cloth I bought when there was only a couple and not a family at all. I wash the food and water bowls, clean the cage and store it in the garage. I tell myself I’ll take the cage to the Humane Society another day, and that, in November, I’ll cultivate the soil around the rock and plant some bulbs.