Some Early History

I have a lot of time to devote to brooding lately, what with the cold, dark, short days and I was reminiscing about my arrival in the humans' lives on a frigid December evening twelve years ago. I thought I would share the tale with my readers since TJ apparently has something called ADD and thinks anything further back than two years ago happened in biblical times.

As an infant donkey of some six months, I was residing in a field with a shelter, part of a social network that included my mother, aunts and half siblings of various ages. On the above-mentioned evening, the resident human and his friend came into the field, put a halter contraption on my head (it was too large and kept sliding down my neck and off my nose). I was lifted into the back of a motorized box called a van. My travelling compartment was lined with printed paper and the second human sat in the seat in front of me, angled so he could give me reassurance. Kind of him, but I was really quite composed and enjoyed the ride enormously.

We soon became part of a huge herd of similar boxes, all flying along in the dark, sometimes nearly stopping and then crawling forward in fits and starts. The entire trip took two and a half hours and by then I had discovered the printed paper contained some shocking left wing views; I tore it into small strips. There seemed to be no bathroom facilities but I found a pocket on the door that served admirably.

On arrival, the door was flung open and I was lifted out onto a snowy driveway. The woman and male human were there to greet me and formed a sort of cradle of arms with the other two to carry me through the drifts to the barn. There was mention of royalty being borne to their palace upon a sedan chair. I ignored their babblings. I didn't let on that I had never actually been in a barn but made a furtive and thorough study of my surroundings. The place appeared empty but the woman was outside bellowing for someone called Daisy. In trotted a hairy creature about the size of my mother - they referred to it as "the pony" and I surmised it to be some sort of equine. It immediately began bossing me around. I was put in a huge room for the night, with a curtain thing in the doorway but I simply crawled under it and slept in the aisle, in front of the hairy equine's room. Daisy was a strange creature but adopted me as her own and I remember her fondly to this day. She now lives with friends of the woman, teaching the miniature humans how to behave around equines.

And that, dear readers, is the abbreviated version of my merger into the lives of my two humans. Since then I have grown somewhat in all directions and have learned much about many things. Mostly, I have learned to be patient with humans because they have limited abilites and respond better to kindness than force. I don't know what they'd do without me.