An Eventful Month, or "A Vole Named Ratty" Part I in Elephant Architecture

My youngest brother, and his wife came to visit me before they move to Arizona. It was the first time I have met my sister-in-law; she looked even nicer than she did in their wedding photos. I am exceptionally proud of my youngest brother. We adopted him when he around 9 years old due to some emergency circumstances with the foster system. My siblings can be tough to deal with and so he has taken camp with her family (who are in Arizona), but he neglects to keep in touch with my mother, and me sometimes. Growing up where, and how we did, wasn’t always easy. My mother tried her very best to give even more than what was expected. She could be tough to handle at times. I’ve heard of them called Tiger Moms before. She grew up in a Military family (Navy) and so our home was run like a ship with daily cleaning duties, regimented but also a lot of fun. My mother was known as Nature Lady at our Cub Scout Day Camp. She held a station down in an amphitheater in the woods where she would teach the various troops topics on nature, snakes, crawdads (as we call them in KY) and a variety of other species she would find while turning over stones in the creek near the pavilion she taught from. I was also a nature lover and I would keep countless other animals; study about them from Peterson Nature Guides from snakes (hognose, ratsnakes), frogs, toads, lizards, aquariums with creatures I caught from our creeks and ponds, a vole named Ratty (one of our favourite pets to watch build her nest out of newspaper while we did our schoolwork), turtles, a sugar glider; we had cattle: bottle feeding calves, and I’m sure there were many more.

Once, my mother took my/our favourite baby rat snake, Tony, to Cub Scout Day Camp to teach the boys with. She would forget to put weights on the lid of the aquarium and Tony would push out of the aquarium and escape back into the wild from whence he came. My mother and I tended to get along the best out of us four biological siblings growing up. The other three tend to focus on my mother’s shortcomings rather than everything else she did for us. It was my snake and I was a little sad that he was gone but my siblings tend to take these mistakes she made to their graves or hopefully to their therapists. When I look back at the education and lifestyle she made possible for us, I am in absolute awe. She learned Latin just in order to teach us and the other families in the homeschool co-op she helped found (she has a masters in English and a B.A. in German), she took us to ski slopes during the winters for our P.E. class (other homeschoolers included) where I would eventually be a professional Snowboard Instructor by age 16. She would organize and commision a passenger train ride from Cincinnati to Washington D.C. for 70 other homeschoolers and get us into the White House, The Capitol, The Spy Museum and so many other tours, museums and historical attractions that the other homeschoolers had trouble keeping up with her. She booked every day of that trip to the fullest that was more like a bootcamp. When we’ve compared what public schoolers did for their field trips to D.C. there is no comparison to how many tours she (with help from others) was able to accomplish.

But it is the moments like losing my snake, Tony, my siblings focus on the most, and in my opinion, use to justify their shortcomings. I can’t do this because… I have this problem because…etc, etc, etc…

Last updated May 25, 2024