  
    |
My memory begins this story in 1962 in the tiny mountain town of Crestline, California. Pictures have colored the scene black and white, but splashes of green and yellow leaves still dot the path I travel from our two-story, red house—I remember the red—through my fort in the trees, winding to the packed dirt trail under our back porch. There in the cool dampness is Petunias’s wooden hutch. Petunia is my brother, Bren’s, skunk, somehow a relative in my mind to thewo hobbling goats fenced in a few yards away. They are all refugees from Santa’s Village (an amusement park in Big Bear), my brother, their savior, fixer of broken limbs, caretaker of the unsalvageable. Petunia’s problem is the result of botched surgery; her bowels tend to protrude where here scent glands once were. Even now, I can see the bulb-shaped redness cry out against the soft white hairs under her tail, and the sight creates in me a picture of four-year-old importance. Bren, fifteen, with cropped blond hair and jeans folded up at the hems, trots outside to my call and deftly pokes Petunia’s bowels back to their proper home. His next move is to tackle me to the ground and tickle my sides senseless. It has never occurred to me that he has not washed his hands. |