shoveling road pizza

today brooke & i went out front to visit with our kitties & i noticed her looking out toward the road. she said, "mom, what cat is lying in the road?" a few yards past the end of our driveway i saw a furry shape lying there, not moving with its legs sticking up. oh crap. i got closer & realized that it wasn't the color of any of our 6 cats, so i breathed a huge sigh of relief. brooke of course wanted to go out & examine it, so we  walked out to look at it more closely & it was a little kitten, not much older than the 4 babies who live in our front yard. he was black & white w/ the prettiest pure white toe pads on the bottoms of those raised paws. it had clearly only been run over once because it was still in pretty good shape, if you can say that a dead thing is in good shape. i was concerned about us being in the middle of the road even though we live on a fairly quiet street; i would hate for a car to zip over the hill & leave one of us as roadkill, all because we were gawking at a carcass, so i decided we needed to go back to the house.

i realized that over the next few hours & days that kitten was going to get run over many more times & we would have to watch as it got flatter & ickier & brooke would want to go out & look at it numerous times as it decayed in the road. with the heat being so ridiculous, i was sure we'd also be smelling it for a while before some predator finally dragged it away to munch whatever bits were left at that point.

brooke ran around to the back of the house & came back dragging a very old, very dirty shovel so that i would collect the little squished road warrior. ew. i so did not want to have anything to do with that furry bug buffet, so i went into the house on some flimsy excuse, but really to just avoid the job at hand. i finally gulped down the mouth vomit, donned some rubber flip flops & marched out to my destiny. i made brooke stay on the side of the road ostensibly because it was unsafe, but also because i really didn't want her to have a front row seat if i started to scoop the thing & a bundle of intestines or a rat fell out. i was standing there in the road with a muddy, spider covered shovel & i realized that i'd never used a shovel to scoop dead stuff before. this wasn't quite as easy as i'd first thought and i couldn't manage to get it scooped. i didn't want to bend over & push the thing onto the shovel with my hand & i wasn't sure i could get a good angle to push it on w/ my foot (never mind that i didn't want death germs on my shoe) so i kind of push/dragged it with the shovel over to the side of the street. i was thankful that nothing disgusting fell out & most of the bugs dispersed when i started wrangling their lunch. it took a few tries, but i managed to get it mostly onto the shovel with only the little floppy head hanging off the end. and then i was faced with the problem of what to do with it.

there's a lot next door to us where a house used to stand, but it burned down a few years ago & now it's just a broken concrete slab with a driveway with a lot of weeds & trees surrounding it. so i decided that i would death march that thing down the hill & fling it into the woods back there to get it as far away from ourselves as we could. but brooke didn't want me to throw it and with my luck, i would have thrown it directly into the nearest tree where it would have splattered & splashed back at me, so i put it gently down into a patch of grass at the edge of the woods & then with a queasy stomach, headed back home.

i'm glad to know now that i'm tough enough to shovel up a dead cat if i need to without asking a man for help (chris was in the house & i didn't even tell him about it till afterwards) and also glad to know that if someone asked me to help them dispose of a human, i wouldn't be tough enough for that. so please, dispose of your own bodies.