Bones · Sunday August 3, 2008 by Julie
I gave a houseguest a tour of my bones. Not the squishy, capillary-veined ones that hold me up, but the dry ones on my windowsills and bookshelf tops; including ducks, cows, sheep, goats, and miscellanea.
What I could not show her was the nutria skeleton that I almost salvaged from the side of the road at Jackson Bottoms Wetlands near Portland. The road was really narrow, with no turnouts, and I would have had to go to a hardware store to get a sufficiently large cooler and then muscle it back along about a mile of road to the car.
Also, I could not show her the porcupine skeleton from a Montana highway, or the pheasant from Idaho, or the deer from Orcas Island. I don’t really remember much detail from my life, but those roadkills are clear in memory.
A lot of people I know are drawn to skeletons. They’re the essential underpinnings of our lives, plus they’re beautiful.
And, as the dog has remarked, that fresh skeleton Vruba found and the dessicated rabbit my neighbor brought us are fascinatingly pungent.
