Listen to Dodson talk about this column in his weekly podcast , which airs each Monday afternoon.

He was supposed to be heading to a family reunion in the mountains. For a moment, I thought he was inviting me to tag along for purposes of low comedy. Talk about surprising the in-laws.

"It's a matter of life and death," he amplified. "Got a dead mama possum on my hands and a bunch of orphans need to be rescued. Are you up for it?"

Frankly, I wasn't. All week I'd been on the road visiting prospective colleges in Virginia and North Carolina with my daughter Maggie and her best chum Liz, fighting a bad case of parental tempus fugit.

Now, like David and everybody else in town, the girls were preparing to go on exciting summer vacations. Liz was headed to a family gathering in upstate New York, while Maggie was going off to Florence, Italy, to study art history and improve her Italian and hopefully not fall for some smooth-talking Etruscan named Julio.

Seems like five minutes ago Mugs was my best fly-fishing pal, sharing her old man's deep affection for goofy ball caps and questionable tastes in screwball comedies. Now she was a fiercely independent young woman talking about doing volunteer work in Africa and studying abroad, and I was feeling a little like the father of the bride left hanging by the empty punch bowl, wondering where the happy Mr. Rogers years went, already grieving the day she jumped the nest and flew away for good.

David wheeled in five minutes later. In the back of his Toyota truck, wrapped in a towel, was indeed a dead mama possum with maybe eight or nine tiny babies clinging furiously to her nipples. The newborns were barely larger than a double-A battery, so young their eyes had yet to open. The babes were grunting, desperate to feed, barely clinging to life.

"I had to call all over town, but I found a woman who may be able to save them," Publisher Woronoff explained as we barreled up N.C. 22 toward a subdivision near the airport. "Her name is Amy Goodnight. Apparently she's saved all kinds of wildlife."

A Talent for Saving

The doctor was waiting for us in her driveway. A slim, pretty woman who could easily pass for Pocahontas with the right set of darkened hair braids, Amy immediately picked up one of the infants and cradled it in her palm.

"Poor things are cold and dehydrated," she said worriedly. "We'll need to get them warmed up and tubed right away."

One by open, she reached into the dead mama's carrying pouch and lifted out the orphans, placing them in a clean towel. There were 10 in all, tiny and fragile, wiggling and grunting. Touching them with a finger, I was suddenly reminded of a snowy winter morning 17 years ago when I got to carry my own small, wiggling newborn in a towel to be weighed and measured in the hospital nursery. I had a similar sense of awe at the magic of birth, and a sudden panic that something might go awry.

"You'd be surprised at nature," Amy said, seeming to read my thoughts and giving a knowing smile. "Given the right love and attention, almost any creature will respond positively. These guys are very young, but they're hanging on. That's a good sign."

"I think the mother was hit by a car," David explained. "She must have just dragged herself off the road and somehow kept on going till she collapsed and died."

"Mamas are like that when it comes to their babies," Amy said with a smile. "We'll fight to the final breath."

Amy's talent for saving wild babies, I learned later, comes from her grandfather Clifford Bean, who used to keep all sorts of animals at his place in Thomasville.

"I got my love of animals from him," she said. "He had every sort of critter you could name around -- pigs, goats, pigeons, chickens, lots of wild animals he rescued, too."

Her own career as an animal Florence Nightingale didn't begin until seven years ago, however, when her husband Craig, then police chief of Carthage, received a call one Sunday evening from the station informing him that someone had brought a severely injured fawn to the police station. It had been struck by a car.

"I told Craig, 'Let's go get it,' and he indulged me," Amy remembered with a laugh. "It still had its spots and was the sweetest thing. We brought it home, and I stayed up all night with it, sleeping with it on the couch and feeding it dogwood leaves and berries, which I learned about in a hurry off an Internet Web site for injured wildlife. At the time there was almost nobody you could call around here for that kind of information, so I researched it all on my own."

The next day, she reluctantly turned the fawn over to a state wildlife officer. Later she learned it had been put down owing to a leg that was judged to be irreparably crushed.

"I cried," she confessed. "I still think about that fawn from time to time, wondering if I could have kept it and somehow saved it."

Lucky Animals

The death of a fawn was the luckiest thing that ever happened to a succession of wild Moore County critters, though.

First came a group of orphaned possums like the ones David Woronoff and I had delivered. There were eight babies in all. Amy ran tubes down their throats and fed them powdered kitten formula, saving the whole wild bunch.

Eventually six got sent on their merry way back into the woods. Two of the siblings, however, were disabled and got to take up residence with the Goodnights. Amy and Craig have their own young mouths to feed, a son Venson and a daughter Amber, both now teenagers about my daughter Maggie's age. They named the male possum "Oposs," the smaller female "Little Poss."

"The kids loved having them here," Amy said. "The male stayed in a big cage in Venson's room and developed a real possessiveness to Craig. The female was so easy-going and very playful. She loved people. They would follow us around like house cats, sit on your lap, let you feed them. They had loads of personality."

Possums, she pointed out, however, have a typically short life span of only a few years.

"They lived out their whole lives here," she said, a touch wistfully. "We really missed them when they were gone. They became part of our family."

The Goodnight family also includes eight cats and two retired police dogs, a small peaceable kingdom of critters.

Other groups of orphaned possums arrived and departed, as did a succession of squirrels, rabbits, turtles and wild birds. Some didn't make it, but most did. People around town heard about Amy Goodnight's healing touch, as did the wildlife authorities and several veterinarians. To deepen her own knowledge of caring for sick and injured wildlife, Amy attended wildlife rehab classes at the state zoological park in Asheboro.

"Early on I learned the importance of remaining emotionally unattached, because they are wild creatures and you're only temporarily in their lives," she said. "But it's always hard to do. Once you've done what you can do for them, you know the day will come when you have to send them on their way into the world. That's just nature's way. You say a silent little prayer and then say goodbye."

My favorite animal rehab story involves Amy and the baby bluebirds.

Someone phoned her to say they'd rescued four infant bluebirds from a house where the mother and father had never returned. "They were so young they had no feathers," she explained, telling how she took them in, nursed them to young adulthood and eventually even taught them how to use their wings, anticipating the day when they would simply fly away.

"I drove them up to my mother's house in Archdale and taught them to fly on her screened porch," Amy said. "They would perch on my fingers and fly around a little bit, then come back to my finger. They were sweet as could be."

The day eventually came, however, when she knew they were ready to face the world on their own.

"I drove them back up to my mom's and took them outside and opened the cage," she said. "After a little hesitation, three of them flew away. One wasn't ready, however, so I took her home again.

A week later, I went back and she hopped off my finger and flew away."

Amy said a part of her hated to see them go. But she knew how important it was for them to make a winged life on their own.

"My mom calls me every time she sees bluebirds near her porch," she added with a laugh. "She's certain it's them come back. I let myself think it's them."

A Poignant Ending

Early the other morning, I was thinking about Amy Goodnight's amazing stories as I drove my sleeping daughter north to New York City for her overnight flight to Italy. Raising a child is not so different from raising a baby bluebird, it suddenly occurred to me. You feed and worry and care for them, teach them to fly, then one day must let them go into the wild blue yonder.

That's nature's way, and with luck you discover that something vital has been passed along and perhaps may be returned in another form. Amy Goodnight's daughter Amber, for instance, recently began talking about becoming a veterinarian.

The day before we headed north, I'd slipped out to check up on David Woronoff's foundling possums and was saddened to discover none had pulled it.

"They all took the feeding tube and were doing pretty well for a couple days," Amy said. "Then, one by one, each began to fade away. This happens sometimes. It's the hardest part of the job. Two held on until yesterday, but I eventually lost them too."

Amy fell silent, smiled a little and added: "The ones you lose make the ones who make it all the more precious."

I confess I thought of this hours later as I said goodbye to my own former baby bluebird on a hot, crowded sidewalk in New York City.

I asked her to phone when she safely arrived in the birthplace of the Renaissance. As it happens, this was the eve of the World Cup finals, and Italy was playing arch-rival France for the biggest prize in sports.

She phoned early Sunday evening to say she had landed safely and was already madly in love with Florence. This was just hours after Italy defeated France in an overtime shootout. She'd been walking all over the famous city with new friends and fellow art history students.

"It's wild and wonderful here. I love it," she declared, explaining that the streets of Florence were in joyful pandemonium with celebrating citizens. "Everyone is spraying champagne, and old men are kissing every girl they see. I've been kissed three times already!"

"As long as it's just the old men," I heard myself say.

She thanked me for letting her go alone to Italy. I said something about it being her time to fly away on her own.

"Gotta go now, Dad."

"I know, Bluebird. Fly well and come home soon."

Award-winning author Jim Dodson can be contacted at jasdodson@earthlink.net.