"The Edges
of Things"
Animals as
Teachers and Healers
by Susan Chernak McElroy
 When I was eight years’ old, my pet rat Hermine had seven fat babies. The rats were my very first animal companions and to my child’s eyes, the bald, pink, maggot-like wonders were absolutely perfect and absolutely beautiful. They grew so quickly, that they changed appearance dramatically from my first look at them each morning, until my final goodnight to the brood at bedtime. In a matter of days, they had transformed from worm-like blobs into tiny hair balls no bigger than a sewing thimble.
When they were two weeks old with star-like eyes and fur as soft as pussy willows, I put them into a fold in my sweatshirt and carried them to the dining room for their first taste of life beyond the rat cage. Gently, I deposited them onto the dark cherry wood of our formal dining room table. Seven small black bodies flattened against the dark wood. Seven pink noses tested the air. Fourteen sparkling eyes mirrored in the gleaming veneer that was my Mother’s pride and joy. There was a slight pause, a collective rat breath.
Suddenly—alarmingly—they dashed off in seven different directions, careening across the surface of the table like spastic windup toys. They reached the four edges of the table with lightening speed. But edges meant nothing to infant rats with just fourteen days of living under their bellies. Without pause, each tiny rat launched itself off the table and catapulted like a pebble to the rug below. Horror stricken, I crawled as fast as I could on hands and knees, gathering them up with my shaking fingers. Some were a bit dazed. Others never missed a beat and were charging off in whatever direction they had been headed before they became airborne. Still others curled in a ball beside a chair leg and refused to move.
Shamefaced and breathless, I quickly returned the babies to Hermine. I never told anyone about the rat debacle, keeping the hot guilt of it all to myself. I tried to put the memory of those airborne babies out of my mind as fast as I could, but in the days that followed, I could not stop myself from reliving the incident over and over in my mind. Something about the vision of those seven bodies leaping mindlessly and spread-legged into nothingness kept prodding at my brain. Like a taunting riddle, the discomfort of the memory would not release me. It seemed incomplete to me somehow, the story still unfinished.
My shame was great, but not as great as my curious, knawing need, and so one morning about two weeks later when no one was in the house, I silently, secretly, gathered up the seven rat babies and carried them furtively to the dining room...
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©
Copyright Susan Chernak McElroy. This article was
originally
published at our website, SoulfulLiving.com,
in March
2003, as part of Soulful Living's
"Animals & Spirituality" Issue.
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