Secret Admirer

I think I have a Secret Admirer. Some well meaning (presumably) animal left this on the back deck, for me to find one morning. Hooray! A dead-fish-gift!

I might have mentioned before that I am decidedly not a morning person.  Don’t look at me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t ask me to do anything for you when I first wake up, and we’ll get along just fine. I don’t talk first thing in the morning. I don’t smile. I pretty much grunt and glare until I after I eat breakfast. My family knows and accepts this about me.

So when I saw an 18 inch dead fish on my deck first thing in the morning:

1. I laughed.
2. I went outside and looked for bear claw marks on the deck and house. (Last year there were several reports of bears coming up to people’s homes while they were outside cleaning fish.)
3. I realized that a hungry bear would have probably eaten the whole fish and just left the head or bones.
4. I looked for a bear in the yard, anyway.
5. I wondered why the heck I was out in my yard if there was any possibility of a bear being in it. (I attribute this to the horror-movie-effect: when the hero of the slasher movie thinks the bad guy is in the closet, so they go and open the closet.)
6. I came back inside and called my family to come look at my dead-fish-present.
7. We all laughed.
8. I told Hubby that we should really get a shovel and do something about the fish.  We’ve been married long enough to know that by we, I meant him.
9. I made a hot breakfast for everyone.

I rarely make a big breakfast in the morning. It goes against my whole not-being-a-morning-person persona. My family is now thanking my Secret Admirer for leaving a dead-fish-present because they got eggs and sausage our of the deal, and technically, it was still during morning hours.

I am pretty sure that my Secret Animal Admirer wanted to give me a cheery start to the day.  Kind of funny to find a fish on the deck, considering we live in a wooded area. (The nearest large body of water is about a mile away.) Perhaps the fish flew over the treetops, then collapsed from exhaustion on my deck? My neighbor thought perhaps a bird dropped it. That’d be some hefty bird.

I think my kids put it there to cause the chain of events that led to them getting sausage that morning.