thoughts, words, deeds

peculiar animals

Prompt: What is the most peculiar sight you have ever seen in your hometown, where you now live, or in a place where you traveled to? Please, describe it in detail.

Hmmm. This is a difficult one because I’m not good with superlatives. It’s almost as bad as favorite. So, the most peculiar sight I’ve seen changes depending on where I am and what I mean by weird at the moment.

One thing—and it was more a heard of than seen thing—was I used to live in PG county Maryland, where the national Agricultural Research Center lives. And in that august institution (which is criss-crossed by names like “Soil Conservation Road”) there are cows with holes in their sides so that the researchers can glimpse the insides of their stomachs. I never went there on a field trip, but I heard about it, and it always struck me as an odd thing to do, and potentially harmful to the cows.

Another weird animal story—when I was in England (and we drove through northern Wales) we would periodically see sheep in fields on either side of the road. Sheep painted florescent pink and blue in one streak as though they were punk sheep rebelling against life. I know, there’s probably a good reason for it having to do with marking sheep that have gotten medication or that belong to certain individuals . . . but it was strange to my American city girl eyes.

But the first thing that came to mind was something that I noticed when my sister and I were wandering ebay one day. Which isn’t exactly a place, but I spend a lot of time on the internet . . . so . . . well, I don’t know how we got there, but somehow we found a whole section full of clothes for lawn geese. Not lawn geese. Clothes for them. As though there wasn’t a need to sell a goose to sit on a lawn, because everyone already had one, but there was a need for clothes for it. There were pages and pages worth of lawn geese clothing. I’m not sure my sister and I have ever laughed so much.