Crumpet. She only has one name. She only needs one
name.
Crumpet has been out of the limelight for a long
time. At least a year. It was a complicated time, happy but sad, a time of loss
and new beginnings. For the farmer, not for Crumpet.
For Crumpet it was a time of extreme
Crumpetude. After officially being declared an undersized hood ornament, a
long-bodied wiener dwarf, too tiny to breed, too microscopic to milk, too small
to show, something happened. Nobody knows what. Maybe
it was something in the water.
Anyway
Crumpet, TMFGITW, sister of Crayola and Pebbles, daughter of Jackie and Abby,
failed piano prodigy, goat show flop, inexplicably brimming with self-esteem - that
Crumpet - continued to grow. Everyone else stopped growing once they got to be
her age. She did not. She kept growing, stealthily, in tiny increments.
And in
less than one year, while no one was watching, she grew three inches so that
she was over nineteen inches tall. On certain mornings after stretching when
she woke up, she was almost twenty inches tall.
She went
around saying it, in lieu of more customary salutations:
“Isn’t
the weather nice? I am twenty inches tall.”
“Please
step away from the grain pan, Moldy junior. I am twenty inches tall.”
Twenty
inches, Crumpet’s almost height, is a normal height for a Nigerian. It isn’t exactly
towering, but it is normal. It certainly wouldn’t be considered Lilliputian,
except maybe in the Belle family. But then on the other hand, Betty, the
smallest Belle, is only about 21 inches tall.
In
addition to growing three inches, Crumpet arranged to be bred, with no help or
assistance from anyone else, and she became a milker, and she took to the
milkstand like a duck to water. At the
peak of her milking she was milking three pounds a day. Wherever she went (in
her mind’s eye) the invisible crowds erupted in cheers.
That is
almost all we can tell you about Crumpet’s year out of the limelight, because
she has requested that a veil of privacy be drawn across these twelve long bittersweet
triumphant months.
So all we
can say is yes, it is true, she proved everyone (the farmer) wrong. She showed
that where there is a Crumpet, there is a way. She built a ladder to the
stars, and she hung the moon.