When I was young I used to have quite a lot of stuffed animals.

Actually, scratch that. When I was young I acquired quite a lot of stuffed animals. For some reason I still have them all. Someday I'm going to get around to donating most of them to some sort of charity. (There's one I will definitely keep, and probably pass on to a child of my own if I ever have any - a very small dog named "woof" that was given to me by my older brother when I was born and is the first thing in this world that I ever owned. But other than that, I don't know why I haven't gotten rid of them yet.)

Right now all the stuffed animals are stored out of the way in the "secret room" - a storage space that adjoins the closet of my bedroom, accessible only by a small door in the back of said closet. The space is hard to get to, since my closet is generally messy enough to have some stuff blocking it. (Although at the moment said door is typically blocked not only by mess but also by my corker - a device used for putting corks into wine bottles.)

Over the course of one slightly out of the ordinary day, I picked five places that represent different things in my life - and at each place, I found two trees and left one of my many stuffed animals in each tree.



1. At about the tail end of my stuffed-animal-collecting years my family moved from one affluent suburban neighborhood in Durham to another, to be closer to both my parents' jobs as well as the school my brother and I were attending. The specific home we chose in that subdivision had a location that seemed especially nice to me - a close friend of mine lived in a house one cul-de-sac over from the one we were moving onto.

The neighborhood has walking trails that run through the woods among the houses, and we walk our dogs on them daily. One of the simpler routes to take, when all the dogs need is a quick outing, is to go down our backyard and onto the trails, over to one of the many spots where they join the road - in this case, right near my old friend's house - and back home along the streets. There was a time when I did that route every single morning before school; now, the trees along it merit a pair of stuffed animals.




2. I was a high-risk pregnancy, and as a result my brain isn't wired up quite right in a variety of ways we're still only slowly coming to understand. Those strange things about my brain have impeded my ability to succeed in education and in life, in a variety of ways. For the past two years I have struggled, off and on, with depression that stems ultimately from the effects of my various neurological glitches; in fact, a relapse of the depression is one part of why I recently moved back in with my parents.

I am in therapy that was originally for the depression - but I'm not presently depressed, and right now my psychiatrist's main role is help me improve my mastery of my own brain and how to work with it, getting me on track for a more successful experience when I move back out. Yesterday I had an appointment with my psychiatrist, and the office park he works in has some trees around it - two of which now contain stuffed animals.




3. From there, I had to proceed to an appointment with my physician. A week ago, on Thursday, I was involved in a serious car accident; while my car was totaled, I walked away unhurt. But on Sunday I began experiencing muscle tension in my upper back that went away easily enough when I massaged it but kept returning from time to time. So I had to get that looked at, and quickly enough to make an injury claim.

My doctor asked me questions, took x-rays, moved me in weird ways and asked if it hurt, then told me he believes I suffer from a fairly minor case of whiplash. I am to take three ibuprofen three times a day. It was also suggested that I not go out fencing that night - not because it wouldn't be OK for my back, but to keep there from being any possibility at all of the other driver's insurance claiming my pain was from a sports injury. This part wrecked my original plan for location four for this praxis (preventing it from being submitted last night), but number three went fine - there are some trees around the clinic my back was checked at, and said trees now play home to another pair of stuffed animals.




4. My father travels quite a lot on business, most often to California, because his company is based in the bay area. Disregarding weekends, for which he is most often home, he's gone very close to as much as he's in town; this has been true more recently, since I left home, but he was traveling a great deal even while I was still in high school.

Late last night he got in from another of his trips; I don't recall where this one was to. His plane landed just before midnight, and I picked him up from the airport so he wouldn't have to take a cab home. I arrived slightly early, found a pair of trees on airport grounds, and, well, I think you know where this one's going by now.




5. Other praxis claimed the last two animals. Tonight I went out shopping for low-calorie sweeteners; I specifically wanted maltitol, for a task I've had in progress since Glasnost, but there were several acceptable substitutes available to me - xylose among them. The Whole Foods I went to didn't have maltitol, though it did have xylitol; misremembering the list, I bought a pound of it (for an annoyingly-pricy eight dollars) and left another stuffed animal in a tree outside.

Realizing my purchase was without utility, I then tried my regular grocery store, but the options there were even more limited: no maltitol, nor anything else workable. I left with only a bottle of bitters and a greater resolve to find the needed maltitol somewhere, ASAP - and no stuffed animals, as there were trees outside the store.