Hello, my sweet and dear readers.
I've been having these really weird dreams the past few weeks. I would almost classify them as nightmares, but I don't think that's the correct term. I'm not frightened when I wake up. Just incredibly sad.
Before I get into them, though, I have to give you some background.
When I was 13, I lived in St. Louis, Missouri. I was homeschooled all through middle and high school, which opened this huge door to discovery for me. One of those things that I discovered is that I loved birds. Specifically, birds of prey.
So at age 13, I began volunteering at this amazing place called the World Bird Sanctuary. What the WBS does is many fold. They have an excellent rehabilitation program where they nurse injured raptors back to health and release them into the wild; if the raptors are unable to be released (like if they're blind in one eye or have a wing that will never fly again), they stay on the property to be used for education. There's also a great breeding program on site, to bring bird populations to stable levels or to use the birds for educational purposes. They do educational programs, have a nature center just for learning about things, and everyone there is a wealth of information about anything bird and nature related.
(I think you can see a theme here. Education, people. It makes the world work.)
Anyway. Great place. If you ever get the chance to go, you should.
Years 13, 14, and 15 were some of my hardest years as an awkward teenager. Like, every teenager has it hard. I totally get that.
But I think I get a little bonus here.
I was homeschooled. Guys were weirded out by me cause I was into nature and the sex lives of owls. I was going through a period where I only listened to the Beatles and oldies station. I was round, not in a curvy fun way but just in a chubby way.
My dad also lost his job when I was 14, getting one in Springfield, Illinois. For a year, my mom, sister, and I would spend the week doing all our many activities, only to leave on the weekends to visit my dad in Illinois.
It was kind of fun, you know, traveling and all that. But it was hard. Emotionally and physically.
And that's where WBS comes in.
Every Wednesday, like clockwork, I would wake up at 7 am and put on my WBS tee shirt with khaki colored pants. (They once addressed this at a staff meeting I went to. Khaki, I learned, was apparently a type of material, not an appropriate term for color. So it had to be specified as "khaki colored pants".)
From 10 am until 2 pm, I did grunt work. I gutted mice, rabbits, quail, and the occasional guinea pig for the raptor's food. I cleaned bird stalls and mats with Simple Green, which I still love the smell of. There were carpets to be sprayed down and vacuuming to be done and rabbit crap to scrape out of a litter box (Cadbury was cute enough that it didn't bug me) and parrot stalls to give the good ol' Listerine treatment to.
I got to watch all the owls work on flying from glove to glove. I fell in love with Tobin, a European barn owl who hatched the spring before I started volunteering. I got to hear wild Barred owls in the woods surrounding the sanctuary and got over my fear of bees and got to watch the seasons change like I never had before.
The best part? Having adults outside of my parents actually speak to me like an adult. To them, I wasn't just this horribly dorky kid (although, I still cringe at the fact that I really was) but an equal with a quest for knowledge. I could ask as many questions as I wanted - and believe me, I did - and they all got answered fully.
It was heaven.
I loved my Wednesdays.
So while the chaos in my life was going on, my Wednesdays stayed consistent. Each one brought a piece of stability that my parents knew I needed.
A few months before I turned 15, my dad lost his job in Illinois. I was okay with it, cause I wasn't too keen on Illinois to totally honest. And it meant I got to stay at the WBS for a bit longer. Six weeks later, though, he got another one.
In Colorado.
The farewell the WBS gave me was amazing. I got to hold Tobin even though I technically wasn't old enough yet. The pictures are still on our fridge and on my desk. I received a framed picture of Tobin (displayed on my bookshelf as of this posting) and a beautiful card signed by everyone I worked with (stuck to the back of the bedroom door).
Tobin recently died last year. I was really upset. I hadn't gotten back to St. Louis in three years and it killed me that I never got that one last look at him.
But.
I think it's okay.
Continued in the next post.
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