Our Living Room Swamp Thing.......

We live in a small mountain community that is mostly populated with retirees and vacation homes. There are a limited amount of properties available here so buying a house requires either great patience or lots of compromise. With our last house we opted for compromise. Now, because of an old friend, we have a cabin that fits our needs perfectly. But the other house wasn’t quite so great. The Muse decided that it might liven the place up and take the edge off of the long winters if we created an indoor pond in the living room. You know, a little greenery, the soft trickle of a waterfall, large soothing goldfish........ You get the picture. Goth was about 5 at the time and loved the idea. It seemed a little goofy but we’ve never been conventional so we did it. At that time Goth and the Muse would spend summer afternoons at a nearby swamp “frogging” (strictly catch and release) and would periodically bring a baggie of wild fairy moss home for the goldfish and dump it in the water. One night after we’d had the pond for a couple of years I spotted something. It was only a flash but my skin just crawled. I don’t know if it was the distortion of the water, or primal fear, but I’d have sworn that what I saw was 2 feet of dark, slithery, viper. It was terrible. It definitely did not belong in my living room! Unfortunately an hour of flashing a light around the surface of the water trying to locate the bugger was unsuccessful and we had out of town relatives coming the next morning. At that point I was the only one who’d seen it, so rather than having my sanity called into question I managed to pull myself together and ignore the potentially venomous, child eating monster for that week. I don’t know if the Muse thought that after entertaining his family all week he’d better humor me or what, but as soon as we’d booted our guests out the door he set to work helping me remove every boulder, pebble, and slab in that pond. There, among some insanely traumatized fish, we found our intruder. While he wasn’t quite as large in the light of day as he was in my imagination, he was still pretty darn big............ and icky. I imagine he’d been quite happy living with us, watching us, anticipating each night when we’d throw him some fish food. In fact, by the looks of him he’d probably been there for years. I don’t know. But what I do know is that he went home that day. So if you’re ever out at the swamp on the state land and see an enormous blood sucking leech, tell him I said Hi and I hope he’s happy in the wild because under no circumstances will we be inviting him home again.