Friday on the Miller Farm

A Blog by Chicken Wrangler Sara

When I was growing up, we had cats. There was Snowball who gave birth to Cinnamon who gave birth to Otnot. Otnot is Tonto spelled backward. She was also named because we “ought not” to have kept her.

I remember one of the cats having her kittens in the vacant lot next door. Then there were several nights of feeding kittens with an eyedropper so they would not succumb to distemper.

When I was in high school, my family moved to Texas, and we became exclusively dog people.

Fast forward many years to a new generation and my husband and I have had a veritable zoo at our house. We started with one dog as promised to our three children. That became two dogs when a puppy needed a home.

Then Rachel’s teacher gave her a guinea pig. That became a herd of guinea pigs that numbered close to thirty.

We then adopted my niece’s leopard gecko which quickly became a breeding colony complete with an incubator in the closet. During the reptile period, we also had a bearded dragon and several snakes. This required a steady supply of mice.

Somewhere in there, we started collecting dachshunds with six being the maximum.

After selling the leopard gecko setup, we began our current chicken phase which has included turkeys and ducks.

The next generation – our daughter and son-in-law, have two cats. When I stayed with them last week, Minnie adopted me.

She sat on my lap while I was working.

Then she climbed into the box I brought.

She might have thought I would bring her home.

However, the “cat phase” of my family ended many years ago. We’ve moved on to chickens, ducks, and dogs.

I don’t think a cat would fit.