Dear Ferret Folks- I have been astonished by the number of kind messages that my husband Dann and I have received on the loss of Ping. I have tried to thank each and every sender personally but if I have inadvertently missed anyone, please accept my sincere thanks now for your support. It really helped. It made me feel much less alone with my sadness. There were a lot of losses in the last week, not just mine, and I was especially touched by the people who wrote to tell me that I was not alone. They, too were grieving. Losing Ping was so sad. And it was not a loss that only my husband and I suffered. Puma really took it on the chin, too. Puma is very much a stand on her own four feet kind of a weasel, but she was...diminished by the loss of Ping. She spent a night searching the house from one end to the other, looking for him, even though I had allowed her to sniff Ping before we laid him to rest beside France, the Fricken' Pigmy Hedgehog. When she couldn't find him she went silent. She walked around like a ghost. She made me think of opening a drawer, finding it empty except for a rubber band and a pen or two. Empty. My husband said he just couldn't stand her silence, her stillness. Puma is very much my husband's weasel. She hardly bites him at all although she never misses an opportunity to nail me if she can. She latched onto Risa DiVincenzo's throat at a MAFF picnic. She hung from Renee Down's nose. She really, really wanted a piece of Bob Church, but he was too fast for her. His Kung Fu was just too powerful for her, that day. I think she dreams of a re-match. My husband called me in the evening after work and said simply "I am going to go look at the ferrets" at a particular store. I had been thinking of looking at pictures of ferrets in shelters after deciding that after Ping's horrendous loss, perhaps I really did deserve the privilege of being a ferret Mommy again, but I planned on taking my time. My husband is not known for patience. There is no such thing as "just" looking at the ferrets in a place where they are sold when you are bereaved and have a credit card. That's patently ridiculous. Me, I quit drinking seventeen years ago. I don't just go "look" at beer in the local package store. I don't go "look" at bars. There is no reason for me to be at those places that is compatible with continued sobriety. So I don't look. My husband looked. And, no surprise, he came home with a beautiful, dark, and lushly whiskered fellow that I have named Todd, after my friend Todd Leuthold who was murdered by crack thugs a year ago last month. He was only 50, but he was a fragile diabetic and the beating he took killed him. The thugs are in custody. They killed him for his new big screen TV, and the money in his wallet. Every time my husband mentions the possibility of getting a big screen TV, something in me rises up and snarls in a purely primitive way. I would like five minutes with the thugs who Took Todd from his little daughter and his friends. I don't need ten, five would be quite sufficient. Anyone who remembers Todd knows that he was a constant friend to weasels. He called his the Fuzzbutt Rodeo Clowns. I took one look at the ferret my husband brought home cradled in his hands, this ferret with maybe the biggest butt I have ever seen on a weasel, and I thought "This is a Fuzzbutt Rodeo Clown!" And so he is. After five months of life in a cage, young Todd arrived not knowing how to dance, although he had the heart for it. Now he has an entire house to play in, and as my husband says, he is "learning his own dance." Precisely. Young Todd is growing into his dance, learning how best to throw his head around for pure joy and dook from his soul. A dance is a very personal thing. I feel, at forty-three, that I am just growing into my own dance. It is uniquely mine, and I hope that it has very little in it of personal regret and pain that should have long-since been discharged. I hope that it gives every appearance of a joyous moment, and that it entertains. My friend Todd was, I believe, just coming into his proper dance after a number of miss-steps that caused not only himself but others substantial pain. He was getting into the feel of it, the rhythms of joy and earned satisfaction in obstacles overcome. And then, he was stilled forever. Perhaps Todd would forgive me for the endearment I give to his name-sake. I call him...Chunky-Butt. But only when Puma is not listening. Puma, for her part, has come alive again. She grooms Todd from tail to ears, and snuggles against him each night. They engage in loud, rompin' stompin' play. The noise is unavoidable, Todd is built like a loaf of sandwich bread and weighs three times what she does. (Please don't throw lightning bolts down on me from the afterlife, Todd, for saying so but...um..young Todd greatly resembles you in form. There is a reason I call him Chunky-Butt.) And every day, he grows a little more into his dance. May all of you find and embrace your personal dance if you have not already done so. The rhythm is there, you just have to give yourself to it. Alexandra in Ma [Posted in FML 6084]