Imaginary Landscape

I came home the other day and got out of the car to open the front gate. We live down about six miles of gravel road, on 20 acres that are home to (in addition to us) eight horses (five of which are mustangs) and two wild burros. Because we live so far from town -- and that is a very small town -- I do most of my “shopping” online. UPS, Federal Express and DHL almost always find us, and the USPS carrier will leave a parcel if we notify her that we’ll be home. There are only three or four properties past ours on a dead end road, so even if a parcel were to disappear, the list of suspects would be short. On this particular day, however, it was not a missing parcel that got my attention. It was a parcel lying on the ground, not near where any delivery person usually leaves a parcel, and the cardboard box had sizeable holes torn in it, so that parts of the merchandise, the invoice and the directions for using the merchandise lay on the ground nearby. The merchandise was unharmed, as it was...

What can one say about Woolly Mammoth? The Ratbag christened him thus because of his great amount of body hair. His real name is Jon, the son of a Greek father and a “Skip” (Australian) mother, as he used to explain. He looks Greek; in fact, he looks great. Jon is a very handsome man, tall, soft-spoken, if a bit obsessed about shiny boots. I often wondered how he managed his police duties, since he was so unassuming and mild-mannered. It wasn’t just Eucla folk (when he lived there) who taunted Woolly. Friends from Perth also rang up, often just to torment him. No one did it with such glee and dedication as Woolly’s friend, who would ring up and announce himself as a representative of Industrial Body Wax, or ask for Woolly as “the bloke with a koala nailed to his chest”. During a radio interview after a horrendous truck accident on the Eyre Highway near Madura when the weather had been rainy and bitterly cold, Woolly told the interviewer that he reckoned the temperature had been “minus ...

There was a time when I had trouble with the gender of my pets. People often wondered why we had chosen the particular names my pets had. Every instance has a perfectly logical explanation. It was the quantity of the misnomers, I think, rather than just one little misnaming. Let me explain. First, I worked with a friend of the family, named Tom, oddly enough, who had a farm cat that, as farm cats often do, had produced a litter of kittens. The hobby farm now had more felines than mice, so he was giving the litter away. He offered me one, and after consultation with my other half, and in spite of the fact that we had a slightly deranged golden retriever, we decided to adopt one of the kittens. We told Tom that we wanted a tom cat, however, as getting a tom fixed—or broken, as the case may be—was generally less expensive than breaking a female cat. Tom brought this little ginger cat to work one day. I don’t think he was old enough to leave his mother, or if he was the constant attention ...