Scratch

Hi, I'm Appaloosa! 
I've hardly used the forums at all during the time I've been on Scratch. I want to meet new people, and I can't do that by sitting around!
Plus, I've seen a few stories on Misc. going around and I want to start my own. I'm not that good yet, but I think that with a little feedback I won't be TOO bad!
This might sound like it should be in the New Scratcher forum, but I'm not new. I want to use writing to be more active.

I must confess; I was a little bit freaked out when a purple gryphon landed on the beet patch in the backyard.
I had just come home with Mom from my best friend Natlie's house. I threw my sweater on the floor, pulled my pinching shoes off of my pinched feet, and woke up my kitten, Hershey.Who, like the lazy thing he is, was basking in the late April sunshine on the back patio, his potato-shaped belly gently rising and falling in time to the rock 'n roll my big brother insists on playing in his room.
Hershey purred as I tickled his tummy and batted his paws off of his chin. I love that cat; Hershey's almost like a person all on his own.
I watched the chickens hurl insults at each other and then peck at the ground for earwigs, just like the lady across the street noses around our kitchen for chocolate when she invites herself over. Chickens are strange; one minute they're so perky and loveable and the next they're mean as my big brother.
I snatched a grapefruit from the kitchen and then headed back outside to join Hershey again.
I had almost finished the whole grapefruit when I felt the wind change around my neck; just slightly, but with the unatural force that I only knew from feeling the air when the chickens flapped their wings.
Wait -- what?
I twisted my head around and came face-to-face with a purple beak the size of a small window. Huge, unblinking dark eyes gazed into the depths of my soul, into my innermost thinking. I felt as if they could see everything I ever thought, said, and did.
I screamed. The gyphon -- it had to have been a gryphon -- jumped back into the air, its heavy purple wings making no sound as it carried itself high above the heaven-kissing cedars.
"Rachel? You okay?' called my mom from the kitchen.
"Fine, Mom," I answered. Then I held my face in my hands; I must be nuts. Gyphons are bad enough, but PURPLE ones? Not funny.
But every day for the next several weeks it would land on my beet patch and stare at me, choke down a beet, and then leave.
I let it. I thought that it came in peace.
I was wrong.