"Emma and The Whale"

G’daddy and Pete had gone fishing with one of G’daddy’s clients and had brought home some live and some half dead shiners and minnows. Pete put them in the pond in the yard and we frequently see him out on his hands and knees watching them, making sure they’re OK, and that they have enough oxygenated water. (He’s like a mother hen and her chicks!)

Anyway, one of the shiners had died and Peter gave it to Emma as a pet completely past being able to suffer her “affections.” She had it in an empty sour cream container, half full with water, floating belly-up. She carried it everywhere with her.

She would often grab it, hold it up, squeal with delight, (No doubt squeeze it) and shove it towards anyone around and exclaim about her fish. She was VERY adamant that it was a girl not a boy fish! She called her “my whale” and she named her “A Fish.”

I put the poor, stiff body up in the now empty container (the water had long-since been spilled) and told Emma it was naptime and she could have The Fish when she got up.

Sure enough, upon waking up, she asked for The Fish, her whale. So, I gave it to her. I noticed her looking very sternly into the container at the innocent fish. About 5 minutes later, she came up to me.

“She’s a ugly fish!!!”
“An ugly fish!?! Poor "The Fish"! Why is she ugly?”
“She was naughty!”
“She was…..naughty?”

(I was having trouble envisioning what The Fish, cold and stiff and quite dead as she was, could have possibly done, especially since she had been resting in peace in her sour cream container. )

Emma looked at me with a very severe and dreadful countenance as if my questioning her was somehow an affront to her authority and as if I were taking sides with "The Fish".

“She was naughty! She was pretending to be an elephant!”

At this point I was thrilled that she chose to make a grand and dignified exit after her horrible denunciation, since I had to do an about-face and hide my smile and try to choke down my laughter.

Just as a side note, about 30 min later, we managed to spirit "The Fish" (who was beginning to smell fishy) away and she is now peacefully resting outside somewhere.

--Kitty