Willard, Edwin, Dale in 1916

     I woke up to the sound of a pack of seals barking in our bedroom.  It was loud!  How many were there, anyway?  And where did they come from?
     My mother used to tell about the baby seal that she and her brothers had found down at the bay.  They brought it home and put it in the bathtub upstairs.  For days they spent their time catching fish for it, but it barked piteously for its mother so they took it back to the bay.
     No, what I was hearing was not one seal.  It was a gaggle or a bevy or whatever you call a congregation of the beasts.  (Actually, I think it’s a harem, but I’m having none of that in my bedroom!)  And they weren’t in the bathtub.  They were right there in the room with us.  Practically in bed with us!
     Predictably, that long-ago baby seal followed Edwin, Willard, and Mom back up the lane to the house.  No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get it to disengage.  It had bonded.  Nowadays, of course, we are told to leave those baby seals alone.  Their mama has only parked them, not abandoned them.  But the Espy kids hadn’t read that rule…  Maybe it hadn’t been formulated for public consumption and headlined in the paper as early as 1916 or 1917.
     As I was struggling with the rest of that story, I came to full consciousness.  There were only two seals in our room, after all, but they were loud.  Very loud.  And right there in bed with us!  The bark, bark, bark became cough, cough, cough and we became they!
     Feeling puny though I was, when I put on my kiss-and-lie-down-dress in the middle of the afternoon eight full days ago, I didn’t expect to be down for the count for more than twenty-four hours.  I certainly had no expectation of turning into a seal or any other sort of marine mammal.  And I didn’t expect to draw a blank when it came to writing my morning blog.  Not so close to Christmas with all its attendant excitement.
     “What in the world shall I blog about this morning?” I asked my whiskery companion.
     “Maybe it’s time to hang up your pen,” was the most unhelpful response.
      Perhaps he’s on the right track.