I found this carefully stuck to a branch while I was out in the woods a few days ago. There were other bones scattered around; the creature—possibly a cat—had died in the vicinity. A bit unsettling nonetheless, especially knowing that someone had deliberately placed the skull there for unknown reasons. I kept it anyway.
I like bones. When I was a kid, my mom—a biologist—set up a small enclosure made of cinder blocks in the woods behind our house. We’d put roadkill inside it, wait a month or two, and then come back to a clean skeleton. We called it “The Mausoleum.”
The Mausoleum was effective at what it did, and it also served as a litmus test of sorts later in life; something that helped me distinguish the more unusual people from the regular ones. Cool people thought it was cool. Everyone else would just stare at me in uneasy confusion—a reaction I came to be pretty familiar with—and say things like “Wait…you did what? Bones? Why?”
(Which is also, indirectly, why the whole social distancing thing really hasn’t been that hard for me.)