Blind. Leading the.

On the way to school this morning, I made my tires straddle a small corpse. My passenger, The Pony, insists on riding in the back seat. I don't know why. I'm sure it's not my driving. After all, he has ridden shotgun with The Master Sweaver himself. But for some reason, The Pony sits behind me, like a young blue-blood with a chauffeur. Most days he reads his Kindle during the trip. Today, he actually sat up and observed the surroundings. Which meant that my one-sided conversation had a companion.

"I can't even tell what that was. But I missed it."

"It looked like a puppy to me."

"Whew! That was no puppy!"

"Roll the windows down!"

"Keep the windows up!"

"Now we know what it was, anyway."

"Yeah. No puppy could smell like that. I guess the white stripe and tail were underneath."

"Well, it looked like a puppy to me."

"You would totally be that old lady in the cartoons who let the 'puppy' in the house and made it a bed and petted it and fed it a gourmet meal, only to find out at the last minute that it was a skunk. You'd be like Tweety's grandma."

"I love Tweety."

On the way home, about a mile before we reached the skunk corpse, on an entirely different road, we spied another object on the pavement. The Pony was on the case.

"Look. Another skunk."

"I don't think so."

"Oh. Ha, ha. It was somebody's blanket."

"What was your first clue, the size or the blue color?"

"It was kind of fluffy. And it was pink, not blue."

"I'm shocked you didn't think it was a puppy. Maybe we should get you another eye exam."

We continued our trip. The entire way, I had been pointing out a bug on the windshield. "Look. It's still there. I wonder how long. Was it on there at school? It hasn't let go yet." I bumped the car up the dusty gravel road and turned into our bumpy gravel driveway. "Wow. That bug rode all the way home with us. He looks like some kind of beetle. Like an overgrown lightning bug." The Pony stood up and leaned forward to push the garage door opener on the passenger-side visor.

"Um. Mom. That's not a bug. It's bird poop."