The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sarah Jensen runs the South End Animal Rescue here on the island. She’s got an old barn, some sheds, half a dozen outdoor pens, a small vet clinic off the house plus a few acres of fenced pasture where horses and alpacas and llamas patrol the grounds along with a menagerie of dogs, goats and the occasional Vietnamese pig. She doctors eagles and cats, raccoons and the usual squirrels. Most return to the wild but some stay with her the rest of their lives. Her longest guest by far is Quixote, a donkey she had to amputate its hind leg back she guesses around 1995.

Quixote wants nothing to do with the horses or the alpacas and especially the cantankerous two llamas. He gimps around the pasture waiting for Sarah, apparently the love of his donkey life. A truck had hit him on the highway where he’d made his escape from the Drummond place north of the Diner where he’d mostly been staked to an iron rod and left day in and day out tied to a shackle on the metal stake. His life with Drummond was about 20 feet in diameter, water bowl, moldy hay, a circle of mud to stand in or lie down in or just try to ignore. Why old man Drummond wanted a donkey is anybody’s guess but when Quixote snapped the rotten rope and hit the road before being hit himself, the last thing he wanted was a 3 legged jackass, or so he declared when Sarah presented him with a bill for an amputation.

Life is hard enough on the South End for us 2 legged denizens, but if you visit Sarah, you’ll feel like we’re the Lucky Ones. If you take an apple like I do when I drop by, Quixote, who is not above being bribed, you’ll appreciate that the world, hard as it is, also has a few Sarah Jensens to offer balm and medicine and compassion. Quixote too is one of us, the Lucky Ones. You decide to visit the Rescue, bring an apple. Or three.

Hits: 21