Z Is For Zoo

It's usually just a couple of lions in my basement, but occasionally they are joined by a tiger or some other big cat. Although I am the one who hid these animals in the house, my dreaming self worries about their welfare.

How can they survive with no sunlight or fresh air? The basement walls are cinder block and windowless; the floor, under a bit of soiled straw, is cold cement. There is no food. The water in the buckets hasn't been changed for days. The animals don't look too good: their fur is dull and matted, and their ribs show.

The reason they have no food or water is that I am afraid to go down there. What on earth possessed me to get these scary animals in the first place? What was I thinking? I am trying very hard to come up with some way to get rid of them. I could call the Humane Society, but I'm sure they wouldn't want to come in one of their vans to pick up a couple of lions and a tiger. I could call the police, but they would want to know what I was doing with these big dangerous cats in the house. I could put an ad in the paper....

Over and over, I curse myself for getting the animals. I am appalled at my lack of judgment. I don't recognize myself: it's as if some unknown part of me had suddenly surfaced, turned the basement into a zoo, and then disappeared again, leaving me to deal with the situation.

Guilt about the starving lions, fear that they will eat me, frustration that they are still there--in the dream I bounce from one to the other, looking for an exit. But no matter how hard I try to dispose of the lions, I never manage to get rid of them. So while I get on with my life, they lurk in the basement, waiting for the next opportunity to surface in my dreams.

(P.S., And now my alphabet is finished.)

T Is For Telepathy

Telepathy is not one of my fortes, with some exceptions.   At certain times, my spouse of the last several centuries and I experience uncanny episodes of thinking/saying the same thing at the same time.  It's as if the buckwheat hulls that fill our pillows become a conducting medium for our minds.

Otherwise, I'm neither a transmitter nor a receiver of notions.  If I want somebody to know what I'm thinking, I pretty much have to come up with some words.  As for receiving, my head is full of thoughts.  I suspect that few of them are my own.  I just don't know whose they are.

The couple of books on intuition I've read insist that we are everyone of us intuitive, and capable of sending as well as receiving ideas.  We're not, however, attuned to this power, and so it goes unacknowledged and uncultivated.  I want to believe this, since I would like nothing better than to be able to communicate thoughts and feelings without having to go to the trouble, and taking the risk, of putting them into words.  This would simplify many social situations.  If someone was boring me to death by going on about, say, car insurance, I could send a suggestion such as "Stop already!  Talk about dogs instead."

The books advise paying attention to those times when you have achieved some degree of telepathy, however slight.  Somehow, I hardly ever manage to do this, and when I do, I reflexively attribute the event  to coincidence.  But I love hearing other people's telepathy stories.  Do you have one?

R Is For Rustic

I remember exactly when I fell in love with the rustic life.  I was eight years old.  It was summer and I was reading under the pear tree next to my grandparents' well, into which two bottles of wine had been lowered in a bucket, to cool before lunch.  The book was Heidi, by Johanna Spyri.

I was at the point where Heidi, after a long, hot climb up the mountain, arrives at her grandfather's hut and scopes out the place:  the wooden bench by the front door for gazing down into the valley;  the tall, dark, whispering firs behind the hut;  the shed for the white goat and the brown goat.

 Indoors there is the spacious, almost bare room with the big fireplace and the iron kettle hanging over the logs;  the cupboard in which Grandfather keeps his folded clothes, his bedding, and, on a separate shelf, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and Heidi's wooden bowl.  How neat and convenient, I thought, to have everything you need--clothes and food--in a single cupboard.  Almost everything in the hut is made of wood--the table, Grandfather's chair and stool, as well as the new stool, just Heidi's size, that he makes for her. 

There is a loft in the cabin filled with sweet-smelling hay for the goats, and that is the spot that Heidi picks for her bed.  She piles up hay for a mattress and Grandfather spreads a heavy sheet of homespun over it.  There was a hayloft, too, just behind my grandparents' house, above the stables.  My grandmother would take me there sometimes to show me a litter of newborn kittens (before she drowned them, something that was kept from me at the time).  I would have liked to make my bed up there, like Heidi, but knew better than to even ask.

For dinner Grandfather toasts some cheese (it must have been Raclette) over the fire and spreads it on bread.  He milks one of the goats right into the wooden bowl and hands it to Heidi to drink.  Heidi thinks it's the best meal she's ever had.

Before the chapter was over I had fallen in love with the cheese, the wooden bowl, the homespun sheet, and the little stool, not to mention the goats.  I envied Heidi for being allowed to go barefoot, to follow the goats up into the Alpine meadows, to sleep on top of real hay.  But I also had what I now recognize as a strong aesthetic response to the grandfather's domestic interior:  simple, uncluttered, with a single object for every need and a place for every object.  And I loved the wooden furniture and the wooden bowl, and the heavy sheet of homespun.

Many years later, I read in The Mother Earth News an article on how to make a wooden spoon.  Although no wooden spoon is mentioned in Heidi, I recognized it right away as a Heidi-type object:  simple, functional, made of wood.  I borrowed a whittling knife from my husband, got myself some wood, and for several nights sat at the kitchen table, making spoons.

As it turned out, a spoon's simple aspect is deceptive.  There is nothing straightforward about its design.  The three spoons I produced before my wrists gave out had handles that were too short and bowls too deep and narrow to be of any use.  Nevertheless, I sanded them carefully, oiled them until they shone,  gave one to each of my daughters, and kept one for myself.  Today, my spoon sits in a place of honor on the sideboard, useless but revered, and occasionally re-oiled, by me.  And every time I pick it up, I think of Heidi, and her wooden bowl, and those goats.

P Is For Pesto

P is for Pesto, which makes all things palatable--even kale.

I have gone on at length before about the industrial quantities of kale that each year burst forth from a single 4'x4' bed.  I should count myself lucky.  Nutritionists adore kale, richest of all foods in vitamins, minerals, and the moral satisfaction that comes from eating what is good for you.

But, nutritionists aside, I haven't met many people--and nobody under age 35--who like kale.  I haven't even succeeded in talking myself into liking it, not even enhanced with that all-purpose enhancer, bacon.  Not even made into cream soup.  Nothing, not a long boil, or my blender, or my teeth, is able to break down the mighty cellulose in those cell walls.  At best, kale's flavor reminds me of inferior broccoli.  And yet kale keeps on growing, spring through fall, undeterred by frost or wind.

Undeterred by bugs, too.  Squash bugs destroy the squash;  the caterpillars of the white cabbage butterfly devastate the broccoli.  But nothing, not even Japanese beetles, goes near the kale.  What does that tell you?  But I should amend that:  Wolfie and Bisou love kale.  Every afternoon Wolfie breaks off a couple of leaves, gives one to Bisou, and I can hear them out there crunching on the stuff.  I think they think the leaves are a kind of bone.

But my relationship with kale changed the happy day when I heard about kale pesto.  With the help of massive amounts of garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and Parmesan, kale becomes a barely-there vehicle for those infinitely superior flavors.  A vehicle full of vitamins and yes, moral satisfaction too.  Who says that virtue has to taste bad?

N Is For Nevermore

Nevermore will I sleep with my hair in rollers.
Nevermore will I wear a garter belt.
Nevermore will I walk long distances in spike heels.
Nevermore will I keep goats (alas).
Nevermore will I invite 100 people and cook all the food myself.
Nevermore will I try to learn to knit (I'll crochet instead).
Nevermore will I listen patiently while narcissists yammer on.

Nevermore will I eat sauerkraut.
Nevermore will I plant peas.

Do you have some nevermores of your own you'd like to add?

M Is For Meow

This is the story of my cat, Pascal-Pazuzu, and how he came by this two names.

When the workers who were repairing the roof of the administration building brought down the nest of kittens, each was no bigger than a large egg.  Their eyes were closed, and their skin showed pink through their sparse coat.  They had that generic look of the very young:  they could have been bunnies, or mice, or even puppies.  Their mother, one of the dozen feral cats that roamed the campus, had taken good care of them, though:  their skin was warm, their stomachs full, their coats  spotless.

I chose the black-and-white one and named him Pascal, in honor of Blaise P., who wrote that the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.  And certainly reason had had nothing to do with my decision to adopt the kitten.  I was in a demanding new job, and had a house full of dogs and teenagers and moving boxes that I hadn't yet unpacked.  But once I felt the warmth of that little body in the palm of my hand, there was no way I was giving him back.  The registrar, who was a serious cat lady, handed me a pamphlet on fostering kittens, a can of special milk, and a tiny bottle with a tiny nipple.  I put Pascal in my pocket and took him home.

As I read the pamphlet, I began to wish I'd ignored my heart's reasons.  First of all, Pascal's survival appeared extremely doubtful unless I could somehow get him to accept the nipple.  Secondly, he had to be fed every two hours, round the clock.  Thirdly, since kittens that young cannot excrete body wastes on their own, I would have to simulate his mother's tongue after each feeding, with the aid of a washcloth dipped in warm water.  Fourthly, he had to be kept warm at all times....

Feeling that I had taken on a desperate cause, but realizing that I had to get Pascal through the night before I could make alternative arrangements for him, I filled the doll-sized bottle and gingerly brought the nipple to his little pink mouth.  He latched on in an instant, and began a loud, ferocious sucking.  But as he finished the bottle I knew we were not out of the woods yet.  What, I asked myself, were the chances that he would accept my warm washcloth instead of his mother's tongue?  Visions of death by constipation ran through my mind as I swabbed Pascal's nether parts with my washcloth.  I needn't have worried:  the washcloth worked right away.

Limp with relief, I dried off the kitten, made him a bed inside a shoe box, tucked him in and poured myself a glass of wine.  Later, as the alarm woke me in the dead of night for another feeding, I hardly dared to look into the shoe box.  Would I find his cold, inert little body among the blankets or, worse still, would he be writhing in pain that I wouldn't know how to relieve?

(To be continued.)

K Is For Kiss

I kiss my pets.  Don't you?

J Is For Jump!

"Jump!"  said my yoga teacher as I contemplated moving to Vermont, "and a net will appear."

I Is For Irene

Enough, already.  Good night, Irene.

G Is For Glad

...so glad I finished construction of my tabs.

You can now see my sculpture and illustrations, and read a speeded up version of my life and miracles.  And you can tell me what you think.

F Is For Food

...and also for Fate, which has decreed that our garage shall be devoured by porcupines.

In June, our drawn-out battles with the porcupine who'd been eating the garage all spring came to a bloody end (you can read about it here).

At the time, one of you commented that she hoped he was the only one.  After a post in which I wrote about hearing hair-raising screams in the night, another of you said that perhaps it was a porcupine in mourning.  You were both right:  he was not the only one, and now one of his survivors is gnawing on the garage.

Is it the porcupine's widow, trying to assuage her grief by feasting on the painted wood?  Is it a son or daughter bent, like Orestes or Electra, on avenging the father's murder?  Or is it just a random porcupine, one of the procession of deer, fisher cats, turkeys, bears and moose that casually roam our land?  Was he waddling his way down to the river, perhaps, when the irresistible smell of our garage wafted across the field, into the woods, and drew him like a magnet?

In any case, we are at war again.  This time, however, we will not fool around with humane traps, hardware cloth or sprigs of mint, but will go straight for deadly force:  Grandma Rube's pheasant-hunting gun.  But first, of course, we have to be made aware of the creature's presence, which means once again rigging up the motion detector that will turn a radio on in the house.  Which means extension cords snaking through the kitchen, and the radio coming on every time a butterfly flits by.  It also means keeping the gun in readiness by the front door, and hiding it when anybody comes to the house.  And it means a killing, which, however justified, is never less than awful.

Somebody once wrote that the peace of the countryside is an urban myth.  So true.

D Is For DONE

...my laundry, that is.

C Is For Cat

...the true King of Beasts.

Montaigne said, "When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a
pastime to her more than she is to me?"

I have been catless for years, but I will not be catless forever.                                                        

Alphabet

I've always loved those Art Nouveau alphabets in which a single motif is
carried through and adapted to each letter.  For those days when words fail, I've begun an alphabet of my own.  Here is the first letter: