We ususally had several cats around.
Nancy was the lover of cats. Marv and I each had our own cat, one named Vegetable and the other Fruit. Cats didn't last long around our place due to the big trucks that were always delivering food to the store.Tim came home from preschool one day with a dog. The teacher, Mrs. Benson in St. John, gave each student a mutt one day. My parents didn't have the heart to take this dog away from my 5 yr. old brother, so Bluff became part of the family. We always could tell where Tim was because the dog would be out front of the store or bowling alley waiting for him. Those days were magical. We knew everyone's dog in town by name.
My dad always had a few head of cattle in the pasture. He would raise them and butcher them. Whenever he had his steers butchered, I didn't eat meat for a week or two. I couldn't think of eating one of my buddies from the pasture.
Pops tried raising pigs once thinking he could feed them the old fruit from the store and the lettuce leaves he trimmed each day. That didn't last long. They were noisy and stinky and no one liked walking all the way to the pasture to drop off the green stuff.
We usually had a fish or two. The fish bowl sat in the bookshelf that divided the so-called dining room from the living room. They lasted about a week. When we would go to Logan to the doctor or some other reason, we always ended up at Woolworth's. Mom would usually give us a dime to spend. I usually bought a fish. I would have to hold it in a plastic bag till we got home and got out the over-used fishbowl from under the kitchen sink. When they died, the little goldfish were reverently flushed down the toilet.
A couple of times Tim tried turtles from the same nickel and dime store. They were too much work.The best family animal by far was Tony, the Pony. He was a little Welsh Pony, bigger than a shetland but smaller than a usual horse. My dad bought Tony from the auction at the county fair. (He always attended the auction and bought sheep or cattle from his best customers. He like buying the Grand Champion because he deducted it as advertising when his picture showed up in the Idaho Emptiprize with the smiling 4-Her and the steer.)
It was the last item auctioned that day and Dennis was there begging my dad for the horse. He paid $300 for him--an autrocious price for that day. The saddle came with Tony. Roger Williams from Cherry Creek sold him. Tony was his best friend and it was hard for him to sell the pony. We rode and rode and rode the poor horse. He went down the line of Thomas kids. I think everyone of us had a turn riding him in the 4th of July parade.
It was a sad day when Tony died of old age. Tim was in high school working at the store. My dad assigned him the task of burying the animal. Tim went down to the pasture where Tony laid. He dug the hole, put him in and covered him up. The task was done.
One day a month or two later, it rained. The dirt on top of Tony settled. We all joked about the whole Tim dug. It was in the shape of a horse, the exact profile. No sense wasting time digging a rectangle.
