Uncommon Curiosity

Last night, after the dinner dishes had been put away and teeth haphazardly brushed, I took the weasels out on a walk to the creek by our house.  It’s a meager little thing with water a foot deep at most in a concrete channel ten feet high, but we’re close enough to the bay lands that we get visits from ducks and egrets and the occasional heron, and sometimes we’re even lucky enough to catch sight of a crayfish or some tadpoles in the summer.

Where the road crosses the creek, there’s a 3-foot wall where you can look down to see the water if you’re tall enough, and we’ve been going there on walks ever since they were tiny.  With some difficulty, I lifted my now no-longer-toddler weasels up onto the wall so they could look down into the water, and we all searched the mirrored water to find the ducks that looked like inky black blobs in the fading light.  The elder weasel excitedly pointed out a robin that was almost-perfectly camouflaged against the ground, and the younger weasel followed her gaze and found it as well, both of them chattering excitedly and very proud of their accomplishment, and of course I praised them both for having such sharp eyes.  The sun was setting, and they laughed at me for being nervous that they might fall in (long ago they discovered the difference between what mothers and fathers will allow, and more than once I’ve been gently dis-invited from adventures with their father that I might foolishly ruin with my ridiculous attentions to “safety” and my requests that they not get blood all over the inside of the car.)  As my weasels squealed and enjoyed themselves, wriggling under my hands, I watched the sun slip behind the horizon and the moon start to glow, and I thought to myself that, despite the year we’ve had and the troubles we’ve seen and even the way the night air had gotten a bit too cold to be standing there in just a sweatshirt…there probably hadn’t ever been a more perfect moment in the whole history of the universe.