A holiday miracle

I am kicking myself for not getting some pictures of this story but it just dosen't seem right to photograph the deceased.

I walk down the stairs the other day and waiting for me at the bottom is Goose. He has a gift. A goldfish from our pond. Nice.

We have two ponds - the big one you keep seeing posts about and a smaller, ornamental pond. That pond was stocked about 6 months ago with goldfish that were like 10 for $1 or something. Now they are all huge and fat and have reproduced so now there are lots of goldfish in the little pond. Well, Goose loves them. He sits at the edge of the pond and just watches them for hours. I had no idea he could actually CATCH one. But he did.

I was not happy. I am tired of fish death around this place. We are very committed to the health of our "wildlife" around here so this did not thrill me. He was batting it around and it was obviously dead. So, I scooped it up into the dustpan and set it aside. I was just going to toss it back into the pond for the heron to eat or something but I wanted to show it to Wayne because I couldn't believe how big it was!

Well, Wayne was upstairs installing a ceiling fan so I put the dead fish outside on the dustpan on a shelf so I could show it to him. About 30 mintues later Wayne came down the stairs. We were getting ready to go do something and then I remembered that I wanted to show him the goldfish. We walked outside and I got the dustpan down (I had put it up high so the cats couldn't get to it) and the fish was GONE!

So, now I am really ticked because the cats somehow got up on the shelf and took the fish. But wait, he had just fallen off the dustpan and was trapped two shelves below in the wire shelf. Hmm....that's weird.

Wayne picks him up, carries him over to the pond, throws him in and the fish............

SWIMS AWAY!!!!!!!!

At least 30 MINUTES after I have pronounced him dead!!! Wow, I guess I'm a little out of practice on this 'nurse thing'.

So, I don't need to tell you all how horrible I feel for just leaving him out there on the dustpan when he was still alive! But, he is still out there swimming around and just happy as he can be. So - wow!

Here are some of them in the pond.

Unbelievable. A holiday miracle here at Barefoot Ridge.