Mars, Jupiter, and Venus were feral, diseased, and weak, and I took them in. I found them in a box off the highway at a rest area about forty-five minutes north of Seattle, where I’d stopped to get coffee. People’s cruelty to animals can be shocking. I found Ghost when I was twenty-four outside my apartment complex in Seattle, mewing, shaking with cold, and wet. No one ever responded to my ads or the local pound about Ghost.

The lambs had been used in medical experiments. I found out about them from a friend who lived in Seattle and worked in the medical field. All the lambs were going to be put down.

“I’m coming,” I told her.

I found my black and white goats wandering around the island. I kept seeing them, and one day I called them to me. They came. They were friendly. They were silly. They were emaciated, their hair matted. I put up signs, asked around, no one ever claimed Mr. Bob and Trixie. They’re mystery animals.

My animals and I are one big family. I go outside, we walk and talk. I watch them play. They greet me when I come home. They are naughty, hilarious, loving.

It’s like having an animal circus around me at all times. The dogs and cats are inside and outside; they go in and out through a tiny door right next to my front door. Both goats wander into the house now and then because somehow, someway, they’re able to figure out how to get out of their pen. The lambs stay outside, but they’ll come up on the deck and look in the windows and prance around when they see me as if they’re thrilled they found me. They have, clearly, forgotten that they saw me fifteen minutes ago. I’m like the gift that keeps on giving.

The horses stay outside for the vast majority of time, but if I open their paddock, sometimes they’ll come up on the deck and stick their heads in through the open front door.

I love my animals, and when I’m around them I feel better, calmer.

They remind me about everything innocent and kind and caring in life.

* * *

The Book Babes, the ten women who regularly meet on Wednesday evenings from six o’clock to eight o’clock at my bookstore, are serious readers. If you are dead or unconscious, you’re excused from reading the book. Otherwise you have no excuse with the Book Babes.

Tonight they were discussing the plot of a book in which a woman ran naked along a river because her anger management counselor told her to do something out of her comfort zone to shake out her anger. The woman accidentally ended up entangled on the ground with a handsome man, the moon shining down on them, an owl hooting.

“I would run my butt down a river naked,” one woman said, “to get rid of my lingering anger with you-know-who.” Oh, the Book Babes knew exactly who Lynn was talking about. It wasn’t a cheating husband. It wasn’t someone who took off with her money. It was her sister-in-law, that witch. Always flashing her money and her rings and her silly, shallow lifestyle. So annoying!