Another Cat's Tale

He left around seven years ago. That was the year I started mowing for a neighbor and maybe he followed me down there or maybe he wandered on his own, I don't know. What I remember is that periodically that year she told me to come get my cat. She may have begun calling me the previous year and telling me that, I don't know, or the winter before at least. Maybe that's even why I began mowing for her, I don't quite remember how that got started exactly.

I told her to quit feeding my cat and he would come home. I went to mow one day and she came out fussing that the cat that she called Midnight (he has a different name at our house) was still about. In fact he was standing on her porch in front of a big bowl of spaghetti she'd sat out for him. "He's not gonna come home if you feed him like that," I said.

Not that I minded so much. We have plenty of cats. And he'd just shown up, the way a lot of them do. Husband came home one day with him, having found him somewhere. He looked just like a cat we'd petted at a park in town recently and we named him the same thing we'd called that cat. (If I were Alecto, I would tell you about all the memories and feelings and (non-traumatic but still a bit bitter) flashbacks of that day in the park . . . but you know, the cat is more important.) I mean, he was a very good, even very exceptional cat, but who could blame him for going to the lasagna meals instead of more meager scraps.

All these years, I've known he was still down there. I knew that at some point they started keeping him inside most of the time, but he was still let out at least sometimes and I would see him, hunting. For some years he would visit us in the garden -- he could hear when we were there from her house -- but eventually he stopped visiting. And then, even if I saw him out, he would actively avoid me and just go home. I appreciated his caution. He had a good thing going and he didn't want to mess it up.

We've never been all that close with the neighbors. We know them all, but we don't break bread together. I think it is a good idea to keep most everything at arms length anyway, and all the more so with her.

Those neighbors recently moved away. I'll spare you the details there. We knew about the situation because well, that's how it is. People know stuff, especially bad stuff. They took their dog. They didn't take the cat. They didn't call to say they weren't taking the cat I suppose because then they would have had to explain why they were moving. They didn't even call to tell me to come get my damn cat the way she used to when she was feeding it, and now it would have no one to feed it. Her embarrassment was bigger than her concern for the cat, but you know, I guess I understand that too. Especially because I'd look after the cat anyway and maybe she knew that about me.

After they'd gone, I saw him around so I knew he was there. The first time I called to him, he ran back to his old home. He wasn't fat anymore but he wasn't skinny. The guy across the road with the dogs said he came over there and ate regularly. I knew eventually he'd get lonely.

And sure enough, the whole gang of us were in the garden one evening and MEOW! I mean, really loud and long MEOW! Loud, long, repeated MEOW. We meowed back and at first we were just wondering which of our cats it was who'd decided to come to the garden. The big grey tabby often hunts in front and meets us in the garden to get petted? Some of them just like to come to flop. But this continued and before long the youngest child went off to see who this was. He came back reporting that it looked like one of our other cats but wasn't fuzzy. All the rest of us said his name and all went off to claim him.

He was a bit stand-offish at first. Hesitant. Unsure. His rug had been pulled out from under him but he could feel the love. It was the other cats he was much less sure about. But he seems to have decided that he can put up with us. All of us.

Except for a few things. Like yesterday we killed some long overdue roosters. The other cats are used to this routine -- they lick the blood and run off with the heads and know the offal will be put off in the woods for them. On the way back to the house with the now empty offal bowl, husband ran into this new old cat and offered him the bowl to lick. He sniffed this rather stinky offering and looked at husband and almost clearly said, "You've got to be kidding. Where's the lasagna?"

A little later, he did learn to slurp from a stream of milk squirted directly from the cow to his head. That might make up for the lack of lasagna and plethora of cats he must put up with in his new old home.

the first cat's tale

I've come to talk to you again

The first morning it happened there were still leaves on the trees; colorful, mostly dry leaves, but leaves on the trees. I was taking the day turn-out horses out -- two horses plus me and a dog crunching through the gravel. Inside the gate I removed halters and the horses ambled away and I watched them, always in love with horse flesh.

And then I heard it. A sound. I didn’t know what it was. Maybe the wind in the leaves of the trees in the back fence row? No, there was no wind. Birds? There was no movement in the leaves, in the sky. I stood there and listened. And suddenly I knew what it was, as improbable as it seemed: it was

the sound
of frost
melting.

Wow. I had heard the sound of frost melting. Was there even such a thing?

And then, a few days ago, I was out getting the only two horses still turned out overnight. The welt of my boots was banked with the frost I had walked through. Their halters, hanging on hooks by the gate overnight, were white with frost. I started to speak to them and then I heard it again. It is a different sound than anything else I’ve ever heard, and this time there weren’t dry leaves to amplify it, but it must have been the frost on the fencing and the twigs on the trees and the weeds still standing from summer but dried out for the winter.

The sound of frost melting.

early winter wildflowers

There have been lately these moments, visuals for the most part, unconnected, like a wildflower bouquet.

*There was coming home, after dark, and there on a small tree branch beside the bridge a screech owl sitting there and staring at me. I nearly drove into the creek before I thought to hit the brake and put it in reverse to go back and talk to him/her. And so we sat there together for a few minutes blinking at each other, trying to understand.

*There was the day that the sky was variegated shades of grey, low slung, but unraveled in places and each and every hole in the clouds was filled with a different shade of intense blue.

*There was the tufted bird in a stall eeeeeeking like a bat almost, high pitched, before it flitted away.

*There was the day the whole sky surrounded us in a cloud, all day, and even when it "cleared" you could only see maybe 300 feet.

*There was the small, maybe four or five foot tall sapling at the edge of the forest that still had its leaves, maybe 10 of them in all, with the tip top three bright red, the middle four yellow, and the bottom three fading green . . . and all so bright in a forest of muted by winter to greys and browns that it looked like a hunter had hung a flag to find his way but instead it was mother nature who had hung her flag and would take it away in a few days to fool any who would find their way by going backward.

*There is that grey and brown that is the winter palette, more colorful in its own way than all the contrived color in the world.

*There is the shag carpet of leaves in the forest now, and loud and raucous they are when you walk through them, and nice when they are in the forest but less welcome when they blow onto the porch and get tracked through the house.

*There is "yoga tree" visible again . . . a big oak twisted thirty feet from the ground and bent over in a perpetual bow during the big spring winds but hidden by the leaves when they grew and I missed it all summer even knowing it was hiding there.

*There is the goat who comes on the porch nightly to ask for her supper . . . and gets it, and we watch her bag to see when she may kid.

This week we marked a milestone: we dried the cow up. Well, we didn't have much to do with it but rather decided to stop milking for so little milk. We've at least found a cow we like if we can manage to arrange transportation for her (she's about 100 miles away).

hey nineteen

Nineteen years is nothing to sneeze at. Nineteen years, four children, one farm, one hand built house, untold agricultural endeavors and unschooled adventures later and here we are. It is not by accident that we are here.

You see, falling in love is the easy part. You can do that with train wrecks. I certainly have. That was perhaps the one thing about my husband that told me he needed to be my husband -- he was different from all the rest of the people I’d ever loved. Although I couldn’t exactly define how he was different, but I knew it in that way you know things deep down.

And so he and I became us. Then there were more of us. And we knew from way back then the sorts of things that were important to us -- that we wanted land (although we seriously contemplated staying put in the city), we didn’t want debt , we wanted kids, we wanted independence, that we were about “natural” and “holistic” and stuff like that. And I wanted animals in general and horses specifically.

There has always been a direction we’ve been moving in. Sometimes we’ve moved more slowly and sometimes more quickly, but we’ve moved. When other people thought that perhaps we should be working on the house, or making more money, or otherwise being more socially acceptable, we just kept moving in our direction. Luck is when something bad happens and you face it down and simply don’t allow it turn out badly. When you refuse to be tossed by the storms of life.

There is in life a force of sheer will that does indeed move mountains.

If I Were A Featherbed

If I were an evangelist of any sort, I’d be an evangelist that folks should grow some of their own food. No matter where they are, no matter who they are, no matter what, period. People would understand a whole lot more if they had just one row of beans. It doesn’t take much room, it can be decorative, it is certainly educational not to mention life altering.

I spent a large part of today getting things to not grow. People who don’t grow food probably don’t give much thought to how much a producer of food doesn’t want some stuff to grow, at least in certain places at certain times. And if soil is healthy and fertile, a lot of stuff is going to try to grow there. Stuff that will choke out your food and turn your orchard into an impenetrable thicket.

I spent a lot of time trying to kill stupid honeysuckle today. Now, I enjoy honeysuckle as much as anyone. I remember sucking the flowers as a kid and have done so as an adult, and the fragrance is intoxicating. But my stupid neighbor (we all have our moments, she just has more of them) planted honeysuckle on my fence near some fruit trees. So every year since then I’ve had to try to kill the damn stuff out. “You don’t like honeysuckle?” she asked in her little girl innocent voice when I mentioned I was trying to kill it one time a few years ago. That’s how I knew she’d planted it.

But that is how ignorant people are of growing food -- to plant an invasive climbing smothering vine near fruit trees. There was once a woman who blithely and condescendingly declared to us, “I know how to grow food,” as if growing food were an afterthought. One year she actually managed to plant a few beds. Beds that were quickly overrun with weeds. Months later she had no idea there were three carrots in the weeds -- because she didn’t know what carrots looked like even having seen them with their tops in the store. Yeah, she knows how to grow food, sure.

Of course, considering that most people can’t even cook a pea, planting one may seem quite the stretch. This is why I think people will starve to death with the end of the oil age. Not that they have to, but that if McD’s isn’t serving, they’ll stand at the drive-thru and wait, hoping.

Well, the wild mustard is coming on strong, and I noticed the fiddleheads up today so I should go pick some. The redbuds are blooming and waiting to be thrown into a salad. The other goats are getting their bags so there will be more babies this month. There’s lots and lots growing -- lettuce and radishes and spinach and kale and cabbage and lots of summer stuff too, still protected. The corn field has been glysophated in preparation to plowing, but the plow still needs a depth wheel (we‘ve been rehabbing an ancestral plow). The pear trees have been sprayed with teramycin against the fire blight. Maybe the honeysuckle has been checked a little in the front orchard, and maybe I’ll get that area “redone” this year -- tear the old fence (and roses) out, put a decorative split rail in (with perennials of my choosing), and make it more accessible to mowing which is the real answer to the honeysuckle anyway. Maybe.

But you can only do what you can do. Which isn’t everything that needs doing. And usually it isn't decorative.

the title is from a John McCutcheon song we had played at our wedding

Dispatch from the Deep Freeze

Out to Pasture
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

Well, when it is really cold, life is harder. Or, viewed another way, not much of anything gets done except trying to stay warm. Which is ok. It is February -- how long can it be cold at this point? It is so cold now, however, that the rocks in the cow shed that I normally use in her grain bucket to slow her eating are frozen to the ground and I can’t even kick them loose. The drain for the washing machine froze up. If the wood you are sawing is wet, you end up sawing through ice.

Since hunting season is over, the big critters are turned out to the neighboring pasture. The tops die but there is still green under the hummocks. And it needs to be eaten anyway. It didn’t take but one trip out for them to get used to my trek down the hill after morning milking to open the wide gate. For awhile I was bringing them back in before dark but lately I’ve let them stay until after evening milking. The longer they eat the better, and they don’t ever give me any trouble. The photo was taken before it snowed a couple inches of dry powder this afternoon.

Our wood stove most often has wood in the stove part, drying it. The load we put in this afternoon was oak. Oak has this smell to it, like puke except pleasant. I notice it mostly sawing. But when this batch got hot in the oven, it reminded me of something but I couldn’t place at first -- when I was at this big horsemanship school with 300 horses and rooms full of tack and tractor trailer loads of shavings. I didn’t know it then, but they all must have been oak. Kiln dried oak, because this afternoon the smell of my house took me right back to bedding all those stalls. To tacking Etcetera for Jeanne Vaire and singing Marshall Tucker songs at the cesspool lounge with Skip and “please pick up line 2” and all of greebie road. To Benson and was his name Todd (I’m sure it wasn’t quite that, or maybe it was) and Holly who has pointedly not spoken to me in years. To fish legs Yanowitz and blind JB and the twins Denise and Debbie and oh my Fizz’s bar. Eating at Perkins and weekend barn duty. My horse to be Lucky, and Out of Luck Charlie (also a horse) who no one loved. Except me.

All that, and more, from one smell.

Leftovers

Io Caterpillar
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

This is a caterpillar daughter found the other day. Long time readers may remember the Hickory Horned Devil from last year. This year's was even more exciting because it was poisonous! It is an Io caterpillar and turns, tada, into an Io moth.


Beefsteak Mushroom
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

And other daughter has found the mushroom book again, bless her. I don't know why I can never put my hands on it. Maybe because I waste too much time wandering aimlessly around the woods after a rain identifying various and sundry mushrooms.

So, this one is a beefsteak mushroom and that is certainly what it looks like. It is supposed to be good to eat but I didn't try it. If that stump becomes covered with them, I might.

Plus, there are a few things I'd just like to make a note of:

I lust after a stainless steel potato masher, the "S" shaped variety. I'm sure it is out there somewhere (are you listening Martha Stewart?). I'm not much of a materialist but there are tools . . . .

It must be noted that a tool designed to take away equine hoof (a rasp) will quickly do a number on the skin of the hand that one is holding the hoof with. Nothing deep, mind you but husband said, "You are bleeding." "So? Haven't known a lot of farriers, have you?" said I. "You haven't known any good farriers, have you?" said the smart a**. May the Gods love him. And me more.

And another sign of living at the foot of the cross is when the number of clothes pins exactly match the number of wet socks.