Family Mottos

It fell to me -- "you found it, you drown it."

So like an obedient child (with disobedience in my heart), I kicked through the pinestraw until I found the brass handle for the stubbed-up yardwater (like a miniature fire hydrant full-blast) and filled a metal bucket (we didn't have pails when I was a child, just buckets), tipping sideways to accomplish a depth sufficient for drowning a baby rat (that smelled curiously like movie popcorn).

Hesitant and sorrowing for the tiny alleged vermin (its eyes weren’t even open yet), I eased it into the bucket (baby rats can swim!), then poked it under once or twice with a white-oak twig tipped with twin acorns; it just kept paddling and that's when I noticed the wings (well, not wings but flaps of fuzzed skin) stretched between its front and back legs (like the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger that I pinch when I'm nervous).

"It's not a rat or if it is, it's a rat that looks like a flying squirrel," I said (pinching my skin-web), and my Mom frizzled her brows, said "hm" and "here, take it out" and when we did (with her prized avocado green slotted spoon that matched our appliances), she proclaimed me correct in my assessment, produced scraps of baby flannel from a bright-colored cardboard cube, one of many stacked high in our basement (just in case), and the flying squirrel I named Snerl (after Dr. Seuss) and fed eye-droppered evaporated milk lived for two days or three in a flanneled shoebox under the den lamp (left on round the clock for warmth).

It fell to me -- "you name it, you bury it."