curiouser and curiouser

I suppose it was only fair that Baxter's curiosity was piqued as I finally took ornaments off our Christmas tree on Valentine's Day. As one holiday now blended into the next, I understood how my little kielbasa felt, safe in the assumption that our tree, his tree, was going to stay there forever. Over the past couple of months, forgotten toyfriends were kicked in its general direction. Dustbunnies gathered there. Life was frozen in this little corner of our house, and Baxter was fine with that.

With so many other things I would rather be doing, I would have been fine with leaving the tree alone, too, had I not finally realized that everything seemed dependent upon putting the tree away. We had been tripping over stuff in the garage because it was cluttered with stuff that I needed inside to help with the clutter of stuff that we were tripping over upstairs, yet there would be no place to put it till the Christmas stuff we were tripping over was back in the attic where it belonged. So it was time to deal with ground zero, before one of us humans finally proved that maybe having one of those emergency call buttons on a chain around our neck might not be a bad thing after all.

Tiny chumley hovered about at first, trying his best to be polite and nonchalant about all the hubbub as his tree grew more and more naked, and the box on the floor filled up with round red orbs and other curious delights. Twenty plus years of smells, seducing my little explorer like the song of a siren.

There is a different sort of patina now covering many of our ornaments, something that I would have never imagined, much less would I ever find so endearing. Schnoz marks, from this very day when Baxter took it upon himself to check out every ornament within reach of his craning neck. Curiosity, thy name is cute.