I had something happen to me when I was little, something not many people are willing to believe. Most little girls have kittens for pets, or puppies, or even a parakeet. I had none of these. I had a dragon. Not for long, but I did. I had my very own dragon.
The whole thing started one day during Spring Break when I was eleven. I lived on a farm in Virginia, and it was my chore to feed the chickens and collect the eggs every morning. Although I had to be up at sunrise, I was a morning person so I could usually think clearly, and it was a total surprise that I made the mistake I did that morning.
     That particular morning there was a storm, one which seemed to scare the chickens out of their puny little minds, for their clucking seemed as loud as when my mother, who has arachnophobia, screams when she sees a spider. I already had a headache, so the massive amount of clucking didn’t help any. When I entered the chicken coop, I saw all six chickens running around as if their heads had been cut off. I gave them their feed, which silenced them a bit, and went around to gather the eggs. There were two or three from each chicken, and my wicker basket was near full when I came to it. The egg was considerably larger than the rest of the eggs, and had little light brown speckles unlike the eggs of most of the chickens, which were pure white.  Rather than in a nest, this egg was lying on the wooden floor of the chicken coop. I thought nothing more of it then that it was a large chicken egg from out best chicken that h ad fallen out of it’s nest, though, and dropped it into my basket.
     Back inside the house, my mother was beginning to make breakfast.  I set the basket of eggs next to her, and plopped down at the kitchen table, watching her cook.  I wished that she would let me help, but she was stubborn and said that she needed no help, falsely thinking that help would mean she was no longer able to cook the family’s meals oh her own and that she was of little use. That was one of her worst fears, the other being her family getting hurt. As I watched her, with her gracefulness as she grabbed the milk from the fridge, the pancake mix from the pantry, and the pan from the cupboard.
As the pancakes began to cook, my mother turned to the eggs. She took four of them out of the basket, the large one and three of the ordinary ones, and moved t he basket out of the way. One by one she cracked the eggs into the mixing bowel, until the only egg that remained uncracked was the large one. She had a hard time cracking that egg; she had to hit it against the counter several times before making the tiniest crack in it. After hitting it to the counter once more, the crack was big enough that she could put the egg into the bowel. When she did, though…
   “Oh my g-d! What is that thing? Amy, where did you get that egg?” she cried.
   “I found it in the chicken coop with the others, Mother,” I replied. “What’s wrong with it?” I got up and went over to where she was standing. There, in the bowel, lay a thing that looked like an extremely large baby lizard, but with wings. They were curled up against the creature, which appeared to have just woken up from a sleep. Yellow eyes wide, it stared at my mother and me, as curious about these creatures it had never seen as I was amazed by it.
   “Dragon,” I uttered softly.
   “Nonsense!” my mother replied. “There are no such things. Dragons are nothing but mythical creatures.
   “What else can it be?” I asked. It looks almost as if it popped right out of one of my fantasy books. What other reptile is so large at birth? What other reptile has wings? No, she has to be a dragon. Nothing else she can be.” I scoped up the little thing, and held her up so that my brown eyes stared straight into her yellow ones. It was hard; the dragon was so heavy.  Why hadn’t I noticed this before? How could I have thought that a creature large enough that, when stretched out, I could barely hold it in two hands was a chicken egg, destined to be eaten? My head wasn’t that bad.
     The little dragon was covered in egg, so before my mother could stop me I plugged the drain in the empty side of the sink and placed her into in and turned on the water to rinse her off. As I was doing so, my mind was going crazy. I had read many books about dragons, and I had always wished that I lived in a world where they really existed, always wanted to actually see one, to touch one, to care for one. Now I had one, a real, live dragon.
    “I’m going to name her Emerald Wings,” I announced to my mother, shocking her.
   “You need not name it anything, young lady,” she told me sternly. “You shall not be keeping it.”
    "But Mother! It’s just a baby; it needs someone to take care of it! And what if the mother comes back, looking for it? I’m willing to bet that the storm is what led her to our chicken coop in the first place, and she fled at something. That would explain the chickens; they have never clucked quite so loud, not even In Hurricane Harry way back two years ago. What if the mother comes back, looking?”
   “That’s what I’m afraid of…” my mother muttered.
   “How would you feel?” I continued; I was on a roll. “What would you think if you left me or Josh somewhere and when you came back we were gone? You wouldn’t like that very much, would you? How do you think the mother dragon feels?”
   “For one, I need not worry about Josh right now; he’s safe over at Virginia Tech, with your grandparents right down the road. As for you, eleven years old you should be old enough not to wander. Secondly, I do not care about the scaly giant’s feelings! I want that little thing out of my house, and I want it out of my house now, young lady!” She was screaming at this point; she never screams. I wasn’t about to give u p, though. Italians are said to be stubborn, and I was showing my Italian quarter at that moment. I wasn’t going to give up!
   “If you don’t care about it’s feelings, think about this. How would you like a forty-foot-long—that’s how long they get—dragon attacking you because she’s worried about her baby, whom she left in our chicken coop? If nothing else, you should care about our safety!”
   “Amy Elizabeth Burns. You are going totally ballistic over this. Of course I care about our safety! That’s why I will not permit you to keep this ‘dragon’ in our house! I will call Animal Control, and that will be that.
     Neither of us had been looking at the dragon as we argued. Now she chirped, sounding annoyed. I looked at m y right hand, which was over the sink. The water was still running, and it was running into Emerald Wings’s eyes. I shut off the water and grabbed a towel. Using it to pick the baby dragon up, I brought her outside to dry off, while my m other called Animal Control. I watched my dragon—as I had begun thinking of her as—hobble around on the grass in our big yard. I wasn’t worried about her going anywhere, because there were fences between the yard and the fields, and in the back—way in the back—was an old woods. I figured I would be fast enough that if she were to run towards it I could catch up to her and direct her back towards the house.
     She kept mainly near the porch, where I was sitting. I was festinated by my little mythical creature, and she seemed to feel the same way about me, her mortal caretaker. She kept looking up at me, with strange looks in her bright eyes, a mixture of curiosity and fear. When we met each other’s eyes she froze; there was her fear. I did not want to frighten her, so I tried my best to sit still and avoid her eyes, but it didn’t work very well.
     After a few minutes, my mother stormed out of the house.
   “They didn’t believe me, she said angrily. “They just refused to believe that I have a dragon in my house. Come to think of it, I don’t quite believe it myself!”
   “Believe it, Mother,” I said. “It looks like we are ‘stuck with’ her until her mother comes, so you might as well believe that she is what she is.” I tried to keep the pleasure out of my voice, but I don’t think I did a very good job of it. I was so excited! My mind was screaming out, She’s mine! Emerald Wings is mine!
     My mother sighed. “I suppose we have no choice, do we? Very well, you may keep her, but only until her mother comes. Once her m other comes, that’s it. Your dragon—I can’t believe I’m calling it that—is gone. And if the mother is not here within a week, I’m bringing her down to the pound in Leesburg and they can deal with her. Do you understand me?” I nodded. Even her harsh words could not bring me down from my cloud of happiness. I had my own dragon!
     Once Emerald Wings was dry, I brought her into my room. I took the old plaid dog bed out of the attic. It used to belong to Innocent Eyes, my father’s beagle, before my parents split up and my father and Innocent Eyes moved to Texas. I placed it in a corner of my room, not too far from my white canopy bed. It looked just right in my rusty red and white room. Emerald Wings walked over it cautiously, and peered at it. Finally, she curled up and went to sleep.
     I sat down at my desk and watched her. She looked so innocent and so perfect there. Finally, I decided to start reading my book for my big book report when Spring Break was over. Since I had Emerald Eyes, I decided to read a fantasy book. I picked In the Realms of the Gods by Tamora Pierce off the bookshelf and started reading.

     The next few days were a learning experience for me. I didn’t’ know what to feed my dragon at first, but I saw her picking at the blueberries on my pancakes when we finally came down to eat after I had finished the first chapter of my book, so I ended up feeding her blueberries, and I found that she also has a liking of blackberries. Dragons, or atleast baby dragons, eat very frequently, about every hour or so, so we were soon out of berries, which didn’t exactly please my mother, who had a tight budget. In the end I won the fight over what to do about the matter, and I went to the store to stock up on berries.
     Emerald Wings liked to be in the sun. We spent a lot of time outside, and the time we couldn’t spend outside was spent in my room, with Emerald Wings in from of a window, directly in the light’s path.
     It was a pleasure to see my little dragon grow and learn. Dragons do that quite fast, I found out. After three says Emerald Wings had grown from fitting in my hand to being one and a half feet long, not c0unting her tail, which added another quarter of a foot. IN less than half a day she had gone from hobbling around on the lawn to walking quite gracefully. She kept trying to use her wings and fly, but it wouldn’t work; they were too small.

     I was awaken in the m idle of the night before the forth day, Friday, with Emerald Wings chirping so loud that Mr. and Mrs. Copewood down the road must have been able to hear her. I wondered what was bothering her, but I figured that she just really needed to ‘go’, so I took her outside. Once outside, though, she didn’t go over to her usual bush, she started to run towards the woods behind out house. I ran after her, trying to stop her for fear that she would get lost, but Emerald Wings is faster than she looks. It’s hard to imagine that something so small can move so fast, almost as fast as a deer, but she could. I could barely keep her in sight, between how fast she was moving and the fact that I had to watch where I stepped, since I was barefoot. As it was, twigs and rocks were tickling my feet.
     Looking back, it’s eerie how she moved. She seemed to know exactly where she was going, making quick, sharp turns and rarely pausing for even a moment to see where she was. I followed her all the way into a large clearing about a third of a mile into the woods, where I got quite a shock.
     Sitting there in the clearing was a dragon. A full-grown thirty-five-foot long navy blue dragon. As Emerald Wings ran up to the dragon, I hit behind a large maple tree. Baby dragon nose met adult dragon nose, as they greeted each other. They looked at each other longingly, and I figured that the blue dragon was Emerald Wings’s mother. After a few moments the blue dragon swept Emerald Wings up in her wing and placed her on her back. After making sure that Emerald Wings was holding tight, she flew up. What a sight that was, to see how gracefully such a large animal could glide through the air. It took my breath away, and I was still standing there minutes after the dragons had left.

     When I finally came out of awe, I realized what had just happened. My little dragon’s momma had come, and taken away from me. I would never get to see Emerald Wings again… I didn’t even get to say goodbye. It was like my heart was tearing in two, I hadn’t even realized how much she meant to me. I started crying right there in the woods, and was still sniffing as I trudged back home.