Dear Lovers of Small Towns, Small Town Folk, and Small Town Ways,

    Mr. Ollie works at the Saint Cloud Recycling and Solid Waste Landfill Center here in the picturesque town of Saint Cloud.  Okay, Mr. Ollie works at the dump. 

    Mr. Ollie does not live in the picturesque town of Saint Cloud.  Too many people he says.  He lives in the picturesque space on the map called Holopaw, but he’s moving.  Too many people he says.  The population of Holopaw has tripled in recent years.  Now there are twenty-seven people in Holopaw, well, since the twins were born he says.

    The twins belong to Mr. Ollie.

    On my husband’s last dump run he was informed by Mr. Ollie, “Yeah, things was going along pretty good and then my wife had them twins.  After that I had her clipped and dipped.”

    Not knowing if there was a proper social response to a declaration of this sort, Sherwood panicked.  “How many kids do you have?”

    “Four—now,”  Mr. Ollie said, sighing sadly.

    Without thinking Sherwood whistled and said,  “Wow, you’re a busy man.”

    “Well there’s not much to do in Holopaw, and there’s nothing much on television at night but junk.”

    And that’s how Mr. Ollie got twins before he had his wife clipped and dipped.

    Mr. Ollie is known in writing circles as a genuine, bonified, card carrying, real live, politically incorrect—character, and he’s a dying breed.  He’s like our next door neighbor, Mr. Medina.

    Mr. Medina owns Medina Pizzeria in downtown Saint Cloud.  But his real love, his passion isn’t pizza or even owning a full set of teeth; his passion is one-eyed miniature ponies and goats with skin disorders. He owns the six acres next to us and every day he comes home from his restaurant around two o’clock to check in on his ever changing menagerie of animal odds and ends, and every weekend he hooks up his red clattering, rattling horse trailer to pick up another load of what look like leftovers from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

    For a while Mr. Medina owned the above mentioned one-eyed miniature pony (we called her the pirate pony) and her miniature donkey husband.  The donkey husband was very much in love with his one-eyed miniature pony wife—the pony not so much.  Accompanying the pony and donkey was a lovely zorse—half horse, half zebra.  The zorse maintained an aloof almost “above it all” attitude while the donkey chased the pony around and around the pasture.  This went on for about a month, and then one weekend they were gone.

    And who can forget the matched set of giant white mules that Mr. Medina kept along with his constantly fluctuating population of assorted scabby goats.  The exciting feature of the mules is that they hated those goats with a passion so intense that without warning one of those mules would snatch up a goat in its enormous yellow mule teeth, snap its neck, and then toss it like a goat rag doll into the pond.  Whereupon Mr. Medina, always a practical man, would retrieve the goat corpse, carry it to the back of his property, and then toss it to the hundred or so waiting vultures.  Sometimes it’s been like living next to the petting zoo in hell.

    But mostly I remember the regular sized donkey that came to live at Mr. Medina’s.  He was a boy donkey.  I have a girl horse. Mr. Medina’s boy donkey thought that he had fallen in love with my girl horse.  And because he thought he was in love with my girl horse that donkey was constantly standing at the fence that separates our two properties making a display of himself, well . . . making a display of  part of himself.  I finally nicknamed him Porno Pete and forbid the grandchildren to look at him. 

    Who needs the Internet when you’ve got Porno Pete living next door?  He’s gone now too—to where, who can tell, why, who can know—except Mr. Medina and his magic red trailer.

    Zoe watched the other day as two goats went out of Mr. Medina’s yard in cages in the back of somebody’s pick-up truck.  Those goats were yelling their heads off, and Zoe, my three-year old granddaughter, was filled with righteous indignation.

    “Ya-Ya we have to save them.  We have to save goats,” she yelled.  “They miss their friends. They need be at their farm.”
   
    I tried to reassure her that those goats were going to see new friends and live at a new farm.  Those goats were going to be just fine.  She calmed down after a little bit and went to look at Mr. Medina’s new peacock with its one foot and a stump.  I didn’t mention that I thought the men driving that pick-up looked middle eastern and were probably planning to celebrate the feast of the goat soon and near here—probably Holopaw.  I say let Mr. Ollie deal with them.

    I’m going to check out Mr. Medina’s new one-footed peacock with Zoe.  

Linda (Mother Nature is Gross) Zern
         

   

         

     

   

   

 

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