“I have asked you to move that eyeball and skull for TWO WEEKS now,” I sigh with exasperation as I set the offending items on my daughter’s messy desk. Of course, I finally have to move the nasty things myself. Maybe I am exaggerating just a bit, since it has been only one week since Halloween. But I’ve had to look at that ghastly fox skull and its accompanying sticky glow-in-the-dark eyeball every morning since then, when it was left by the bathroom sink where I brush my teeth. Does anyone else have to put up with this type of stuff? An animal skull gaping at you from under your hair accessories while you snatch a barrette off of its hard cranium. As if it needed that barrette. But now it’s looking at you as if you just stole something from him. Or maybe it was a her. Can’t tell at this point.
There is a story behind the skull… (isn’t there always?) It was rescued from the bottom of Lake Nojiri up in the mountains of Japan where we go most summers on vacation. Merely the bones were rescued, unfortunately not the fox, and Elsa had spent many happy hours diving for every bit of bone that she could to piece together a complete fox skeleton. She was proud to be able to point out to the other bone divers that the skull (which was the first part brought up) was certainly not a bird because birds did not have teeth and especially not long canines as this skull definitely did. The skeleton was lovingly assembled on the dock and then bundled home in a bag to be soaked in bleach and scrubbed clean. (No I did not agree to do that.)
The fox skull ended up decorated with dramatic black lines and attached to my daughter’s hair as the crowning touch to a creepy roadkill-Goth ensemble that she pulled together for her last year of trick-or-treating. She will be in high school next year after all, so of course she won’t go dressing up next year… So this year’s costume was her last hurrah. It was quite the deal. She even had the added chill of red contact lenses. Lovely.
Very dramatic, but now do I have to look at a skull everyday? And what about those dead beetles and the occasion insect leg that I find laying around when she hasn’t been very conscientious about her insect collection. And there was that extremely long hair worm that lived in a jar for I don’t know how long. You will never imagine where that came from. Do a search on “Hair Worm” if you really want to know. The one she collected came from a praying mantis. Why can’t she just decorate her room with stuffed animals like other normal kids? I like stuffed animals and the live ones are nice too. I’m just not too fond of the unstuffed ones. I guess what we really need is a creepy lab out in the back yard to hold all of these wonderful treasures. As long as it was far away from my toothbrush. Then I think I would feel much better.