Shortly before Christmas, someone brought a Sea Monkey kit into our consignment shop. Woohoo! thought I. Sea Monkeys! I love those little guys. As our morning processor was pricing this item, she saw the way I was lingering, chattering away about brine shrimp, and practically falling over myself to get a good look at what was in the kit (to see if it was complete. It was). Finally, laughing, she asks if I think I want to buy it, prices it, and sets it aside with my name on it. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Sea Monkeys!
I get home… and that was the night of the windstorm here in Seattle. I kept the kit, unopened, on my desk nearby, but holding off activating the wee eggs until the storm passed. Then the power went out for four days. Sigh. “Hang on, lil monkeys,” I told them. “Your time to live again is near.”
The power comes back on moments before we bring my parents and brother in from the airport. The place is freezing. Now that we have power, I start turning on all the heaters and lights. Ahhh! Hang on, lil monkeys, it’s still too cold.
A couple of days before Christmas, with the house nice and warm and cheery, I invite my family into the kitchen, where I have a place for the monkey tank; warm, light, and safe from the cats, and full of water with the solution that has been sitting there for 24 hours. Only my brother and my husband are interested, so we troop out into the kitchen.
“Watch this!” I say, and with a flourish, deposit the foil of monkeys into the tank. We all eagerly peer inside the tank, backlit from the overhead oven light. We peer… and peer… and peer some more.
“They’re in there,” I say. “Just keep looking. They’re itty bitty specks.”
My brother pats me on the back and cheerfully calls me a failure. My husband remains by my side, but neither of us see a thing. Not a speck, not a mote, not a baby brine shrimp to be seen. He leaves, thinking I just don’t know what to look for, or they’re just too tiny.
“But… I’ve had Sea Monkeys before! I know what they look like when they’re specks! I know… they’re… they’re in there!” I wail. Eventually, I give up. Maybe I’ll see them better in the morning.
I don’t.
Christmas comes and goes, and while I faithfully sprinkle a bit of food into the tank every three days, there are no Sea Monkeys. My parents and brother go home, happy with the holidays, but I am missing something: I am missing Sea Monkeys.
Mid-January, I just gave up feeding them. “I’ll write to the company,” I explain to my husband. “It says in this booklet that they’ll send me new monkeys if mine fail to… to…”
“It’s okay, honey,” he consoles me. I sniffle. Hmph.
A couple of weeks go by, and here I was last night, cooking up some bacon. I poured the fat from the bacon into a mug to set aside for later use. I needed a new mug, since we hadn’t had bacon in some time. The only spot left for the mug on the counter was next to the empty Sea Monkey tank. I peered inside once again, hoping for some sign of life. Nothing. I strained some more. Nothing. I stood up.
“Well,” I thought. “If the smell of that bacon doesn’t wake you up, then nothing will.”
So today I’m getting ready to make some bread, and as I’m cleaning up the counter, I notice something moving in the tank. Startled, I peer inside.
THERE ARE TWO SEA MONKEYS! And one of them is HUGE! The other one is just a little guy, but you can see them both, plain as day. I got out the Sea Monkey food and sprinkled a teeny bit in. Woohoo!
I credit this little miracle entirely to bacon. It has the power of life.
So. What has bacon done for you, lately? 
