Tales from the Shark Tank

It’s entirely fascinating to watch my “big girls”, as I’ve taken to calling the adult cats. In winter, they mostly stayed in, but now with the warm weather and the abundance of interesting things, they much prefer to stay out pretty much from dawn until dark. The don’t wander far from the house; clearly, this is their territory, and they patrol it carefully. I have occasionally heard vociferous hissing and growls and gone out to see some strange cat departing at a far faster rate than is consistent with feline dignity. When that happens, the resident cat responsible prances over in what can only be characterized as a strut, demanding praise and petting as her due. I’ve even seen Sophia face down a raccoon about three times her size, though that was from the safety of the inside of the glass door. Still, I know she can be heard through the glass, because I can hear her even with my dull human ears. And she was quite impressive, with a growl that would have done credit to a twenty pound tom, fully fluffed up and with paws slashing the air faster than my eye could follow. She was clearly promising mayhem, and that raccoon took her seriously, staging a hasty retreat.

The soybean field about fifteen feet from our side door is their favorite place to prowl. About knee high on me, the plants make a jungle that is perfectly to the scale of the cats. They hunt endlessly, catching inumerable small mammals and birds. And watching them, I can easily see their larger cousins stalking through the grass of an African plain. The proportions are the same; it is only the scale that’s different. I catch glimpses of Tornado’s sleek blackness through the leaves, but Sophia’s grey fur disappears into the shadows in ways I could not have imagined possible. All of her is grey, even her nose and paw-pads, but it is not a solid color, like a crayon. It is shaded, dappled and striped in subtle variations. She’s slow, deliberate, overweight – and none of that matters as she stalks into the leaves and vanishes into what is, to her, a jungle. And like their large cousins, they hunt cooperatively and share what they catch. It’s quite something to watch. Sophia and Tornado may be my “big girls”, but that’s only in relation to baby Cloud. Compared to the truly big cats, they’re miniature predators, tigers at doll-house scale who are just as effective in their own sphere.

That makes it all the more amazing to me that they choose to live with humans, and even more so that they actively seek us out to give and receive affection. Tornado presses up against my leg every night, and rubs her head against my cheek every morning. Sophia talks to me all the time, and curls up on the floor near to wherever I am in the evening; in her own understated way she actively seeks my company, if not my lap. Little Miss Cloud still considers me the source of all safety, scrambling up to my shoulder whenever anything or anyone new presents itself, peering down in prudent curiousity. I read recently that archeological discoveries indicate that cats may well have essentially domesticated themselves, choosing to live near human communities where the food supply was more stable. That would explain why creatures who share so much with their wild kindred choose us as their companions.

Listening to Congressional hearings…..

A, incredulous: “This man (Alberto Gonzales) graduated from Harvard?”

B, sweetly: “Was he a legacy?”

My son and I were listening to a comic book dramatization on the car stereo as we ran around doing errands today. The entire story is told in dialogue, so there’s been a lot of “this is what happened, right Mom?” as my son tries to figure out what is inferred. At the end of it, the villain gets teleported across the galaxy, where he runs into pirates who prepare to feed him to a prehistoric monster. (Don’t ask.) The last thing you hear in that scene is the monster’s roar.

So at the end of the segment, J. says “The monster ate him and he’s going to morph into poop. Right, mom?”

I could not explain to his satisfaction why I was laughing so hard.

Last year, for either birthday or midwinter, our son asked his grandparents for a digital camera. I figured a simple, not terribly expensive one would be appropriate, but they did far better than that, and got him one I’d be pleased to be using. He played with it a little, then put it aside. Well, he learns more by seeing, so I pulled it out and started taking pictures with it. Anything he came running asking me to look at, I’d take a picture of – with his camera, not mine. Sunsets or cirrus clouds, cats or contrails, if I could get it in the viewscreen it became a photo.

I did that for perhaps a week, when he started saying “show me”. So I did. How to center the image. How to snap the picture. How to check and see if you got the image you wanted. How you needed to open the sliding glass door, because otherwise you’d get a photo of the reflection off the glass instead of whatever was outside it, especially if the flash went off. How your brain ignores the screen in the window, but the camera can’t. How it makes a difference if you’re standing a couple steps up, even on sky shots – and how sometimes Mom can get a better shot just by virtue of being taller and then standing on those steps. How unless a kitten is asleep, you want to aim where she’s going, not where she is, because she is never standing still!

Now the camera rejoices on the kitchen counter, ready to a little boy’s hand. He’ll be playing outside and suddenly dash in, grab the camera, take a couple of pictures, and put it back. He’s having a wonderful time with it. And I’m having an even better time, watching him learn not only to look, but to truly see.

I have been reminded that this is, in fact, Indiana, the last place to give in and join the rest of the country in observing daylight savings time. It has been my home since 1974, and I still wonder, sometimes, how I ended up staying here.

The judge who ruled that Wiccan parents could not expose their son to their religion is no longer on the bench in Marion County Superior Court.

He’s been appointed to the recent vacancy on the Indiana Court of Appeals.

When I was in high school, one of my catch-phrases used to be “understood and accepted”. I meant that; once I understood the motivations or reasons for something, I couldn’t stay angry about it, and would generally accept it. Sometimes that made no sense, because I would accept things that had hurt me without objection on the basis that they were understandable. That it was possible to accept anything once understood reflected both the tremendously sheltered nature of the world I lived in and my own idealism and ability to put myself in another’s shoes, at least mentally.

I stopped using that phrase long ago, but I was reminded of it with my friend’s comments on the man who attacked her. She does understand him, both what made him what he is and why he acted as he did, and so do I. But his conduct remains entirely unacceptable. I won’t say he’s lost his claim to human status, but he has certainly lost any claim to civilized status. He has also forfeited any claim to a place in our society. I am still idealistic; it still helps, if not the way it did in my teens, to understand the reasons for a person’s actions or behavior. But it no longer leads automatically to acceptance. It no longer defuses anger. There are some things that one should be angry about, some things that are unacceptable no matter what the explanation. It doesn’t matter that this jerk attacked a person who was trying to help him, nor that he did it in the context of his own trial. It matters that he attacked another person, period. And what exacerbates it for me isn’t that he attacked his counsel, or my friend, but that a tall, strong 20 year old man attacked a 50 year old woman about 5′3″ tall with bones like a bird. He’s locked up now, and will be until he himself is middle-aged, assuming he doesn’t antagonize someone into killing him. She, and all the rest of us, are safe from him. While he may not understand the connection between his actions and the consequences of them, the rest of us do, and no amount of understanding can make it acceptable.

During the time when I was feeding Tornado kitten chow, her mama put on a lot of weight. She liked the kitten food better than her own, and I couldn’t figure out a way to keep her out of it. (Feeding Tornado upstairs didn’t occur to me.) Their doctor was of the opinion that now that they’re both eating adult food formulated for indoor cats, Sophia should gradually lose weight.

She hasn’t been, and I over the past couple of days I have been coming to understand what’s happening here. If all she were eating were her kibble, her weight might be a bit more controlled, but it isn’t. She is a consummate huntress, and she eats what she catches. Yesterday I found the remains of two semi-dismembered mice (to quote my son, EWWWW), and today she caught a small brown bird of some sort and is even now neatly devouring it in the yard a few feet from the side yard, after my hard-hearted refusal to let her bring it inside. She’s keeping up her skills and supplementing her diet all at once, so I don’t suppose I should expect her to lose weight any time soon. Since at least one of those mice was probably caught in the house, I haven’t much expectation that winter will slow her down either. But since it was her hunting skills that won her promotion to house-cat, and she has taught them to her daughter, I’m not really complaining.

Every so often, I find myself wondering what this farm was like two or three or four generations ago. The current barn is basically a metal tool shed on steroids, a utilitarian structure with a concrete floor and a huge asphalt area in front of it that must have been put down by the folks whose farm it was, judging by the heap of extra asphalt behind the barn. That scrap heap is very ugly; I still have to figure out a way to cover or conceal it. Clearly the structure, with its metal walls and roof, was put up pretty recently.

But there are walkways in the front yard leading to a wall with a window, and bits and pieces of sidewalk peeping out from under the grass in the back leading nowhere at all. I chose an area about a hundred feet from the house in the back yard for a garden, and the harrow turned up not just the expected stones, but pieces of brick. I dug in further back with my spading fork, intending to put in a patch of yarrow, and turned up some laid brick from a walk or floor or something about eight inches down. I put the yarrow someplace else, but I wonder what was there. Is that where the original barn was, or a path to it? Were there other outbuildings, and what would they have been? Or was there a bricked-over yard to provide a surface for trucks or wagons to drive over before the front was paved in asphalt? If so, then they had to approach from either east or west. South of the house was fields. Now it’s been let to go back to woods, but that too has to be relatively recent, as the trees are only about a foot across. North of that patch of brick is the house, and in between the house and the area the sidewalks lead to are a number of huge old trees. Maples and sycamores don’t grow to a diameter of four feet quickly; no trucks could have passed that way in the last fifty years or more.

I wonder what life was like here, when those walkways led to something and the bricks hidden under the back yard paved or floored a structure. I wonder why those things were torn down and how the walks and brick paving came to be covered over in earth and grass. The owner is my age; she can tell me some of her family’s stories, but some of what I’ve found she can’t account for either. All that survives of that original farm are those huge trees, this house and the fields to the west of it. But clearly there was far more at some time, and I can’t help but wonder what it was.

One of my Indy expeditions this summer I took a rooting of spearmint from the bed my grandfather put in when I was in high school. He regretted doing so when he realized exactly how invasive it was. He tried to kill it off several years running, but it is in the nature of mint to return from apparent eradication if so much as an inch of root is left in the ground, and after awhile Gramps decided that having it in a bed bounded by driveway, front walk and the garage provided sufficient limitation on its expansionist tendencies. In other words, after it came back from bare ground three years running, he gave up. So there it is; I think the rose bush that was there is still hidden somewhere in the midst of it, but I’m not sure.

I had a place I wanted to put it, in a corner where getting in with the mower is difficult to say the least. But I do know how mint spreads, so I decided to put it in a large pot to keep it in bounds. A large bag of potting soil later, the mint was in the pot, watered, and set in the corner I had chosen. A couple of days later, the family took off to spend most of a week in Indianapolis seeing friends and family. (Those adventures are a tale for a different day.) We got back on Sunday evening, and I went to see what of my plants needed water. The first place I stopped was by the recently potted mint.

The pot had been dumped over, the dirt within scattered across the grass. I thought at first perhaps that there’d been a storm; the winds that blow across from the open fields have knocked over full garbage bins, and while I couldn’t easily imagine it knocking over forty pounds of dirt, it is in the realm of possibility. But in that case, I thought the mint itself should be in the mess. But it wasn’t. It was gone completely. A couple of phlox I’d transplanted and put in with the mint were still there, bedraggled and dead, but the mint itself was nowhere in sight.

I could be wrong, of course, but I suspect that some creature thinks mint is a wonderful treat. There are a good many candidates, so many I can’t begin to figure out which it would be. The raccoons have dexterous little hands, the bobcats are strong enough to knock a flower pot over, and the deer, if they tugged against the roots, could pull the pot over inadvertently. I don’t suppose it matters too much what it was, so long as I learn from it and don’t try to pot up my mint when I get the next rooting. So I guess I’ll have to put the mint in the ground after all, and keep it in bounds with the mower.

Please make welcome to the Blog-sphere The Bardd Before the Bar. Cori is my oldest friend, and a wonderful writer. Beyond that, I’ll let the bardd’s* words speak for themselves.

*Bardd isn’t a typo. It’s a Briton word meaning bard, poet, singer, storyteller, wordsmith, keeper of lore and truthspeaker. All that, in a single word, and only the beginning of a description of a most complex and fascinating person.