Little Losses

Freckles was dead when I woke.

Stuck between the glass of the terrarium and the pottery water dish he drank from for 13 years. He was clearly moving about and just stopped suddenly, completely unaware that last step was indeed his last.

Aidan was only around 7 when he got him. I wonder how old Freckles was. Knowing now how long they live and how slow they grow, probably older than I thought.

Pets were something of a life lesson at the beginning. I always thought, more about teaching to love rather than be loved, to care and be responsible, and to learn grief and loss in a safer way.

I’m sitting in the backyard of the home my family and Freckles only know - the only home that knows us and the only place we all know together, to the exclusion of everyone else. 

There is a rare mild thunderstorm with only a spattering of louder-than-it-really-is rain bouncing off the top of the umbrella I sit beneath, while the shallow low distant rolling rumble of sorry sadness moves west to east above me.

The new and first grave in our backyard rests freshly covered beneath a 25 year old magnolia tree. I suggested that as a place to lay Freckles to rest because it has a story. 

I planted that small tree from a 5 gallon bucket 25 years ago in a place in the planter my wife and I arbitrarily drew with a can of spray paint. The tree never flourished there, but it lived - barely growing. Really, just hanging on. It grew only a few inches taller than it was when we planted it - until about 4 years ago when I moved it to a more open and brighter spot.

Since then, it’s flourished and found a new life, and grown at least 10 feet, and now it is covered in more flowers than it should be able to support after so much time only slowly growing.

Freckles sits beneath that second-chance late bloomer now, while showers splash atop the miniature pottery cave he lived in his whole life, a shrine, but also a new home for Fred and Wilma, the lizards I’ve named in my backyard. Their babies will sleep right above Freckles, hiding in the same rock he did his entire life.

The rain is milder now, and the thunder more distant but still tangible in the chest. 

Some losses are larger than their smallness suggests.