Dear Ferret Folks-

I missed you last night. I missed you, because I had something
wonderfully ferrety and silly to share, and I don't have many ferret
appreciators to share it with. So I'll share it here, and let's see if
all hell breaks loose again. If so, I'll just place a set of rabbit
ear antennas on my head, and wrap the whole thing in foil to protect
me from negative thoughts. Not a tin foil hat, a tin foil *helmet*.

I told you that my ferret Todd, also known as "Chunky Butt" is a big
boy. A very big boy. He is one of the biggest Marshall's ferrets that
I have ever seen. And he spent months in a small cage, eating. Just
eating and sleeping. There were no toys in that cage. By the time my
husband brought him home he was the size of a badger. I often say that
Todd is not a ferret, he is a badger because of his size, and the fact
that he has a reverse badger thing going on. Instead of having a dark
face with a white badger stripe running up from his nose and between
his eyes, he has a dark stripe instead in a white face. He is a very
dark fellow, with dainty white toes. He is beautiful. It makes me happy
just to say his name, because I remember my friend Todd Leuthold, and
remember how much he loved his ferrets, loved his daughter, loved life.

And my Todd has a chunky butt. No two ways around it. Even after a few
weeks here with lots of free roam time, he still has a chunky butt. He
no longer looks like a loaf of bread trying to war dance, but he is is
still a big boy. He has grown into his dance, learned grace and the joy
of running, the joy of jumping. And he has learned about butter. Yes,
butter.

Todd loves butter.

I keep a stick at room temperature in a small plastic Tupperware dish.
I don't keep it on my big kitchen island anymore, because I kept
finding Todd bellied up to it, eyes closed in perfect bliss, licking
the butter and making that face that they make when they are licking up
sticky vitamin paste. You know the one. It's perfectly ridiculous. I
grew up in a house where it was a perfectly normal thing to find cat
tongue prints in the butter. When guests come, you turn the stick over
for politeness sake.

But I draw the line at mustelid prints in the butter. More to the
point, I don't want young Todd to develop coronary artery disease from
his butter addiction. I moved it to the other end of the counter. He
found it. I left it near the stove for a while, but them I baked bread,
forgot, and moved it back to the kitchen island. Todd found it. There
he was again, licking, licking, licking, eyes squeezed tightly shut in
weasel bliss. I tried moving it to the inside of the refrigerator. Then
I had to remove Todd from the inside of the refrigerator. Again, and
again...and again.

I gently detached Todd's face from the butter, and took the butter away
again and set the butter back beside the stove, where he can't get it.

Ferret? Cant? These words don't go together. I really should know
better.

Last night I had my five year old nephew Alex over to spend the night.
I took the big cushions off of the yellow sofa, and unfolded the guest
bed. We make it a habit to look under the mattress whenever we do that,
just in case some ferret has left something unspeakable under there.
Well, my husband looked. And under there, glowing with its own pale
yellow light was...half a wrapped stick of butter, the paper gently
dimpled with fang holes. And on the open end, a pattern of small
tongue lick prints that reminds me of the way a chrysanthemum holds
its petals. A butter blossom.

No, Todd is not a chunky butt. He is a *butter* butt.

Alexandra in MA
Readying the Reynolds Wrap

[Posted in FML 6122]