The party light project

Our Christmas decorations have progressed through the years from full blown decorated tree inside and lights on the bushes in front of the house to lights on the sun porch and a few favorite ornaments around the house. One string of lights stays up all year, the twenty-five year-old lizard lights. An innocent comment a couple of months ago ("the lizards look lonely") led to a search for more party lights. Now joining the lizards are more vintage lights and the sun porch is lit up like a Christmas tree without the tree. Circumnavigating the four walls of the porch are carrots, lobsters, chili peppers, whales, grapes, musical notes, sunflowers, and motorcycles. Except for the motorcycles, which are new, the lights range from 1986 to 1999 and are still in good working order. I ran out of room for the trout, so they are outside on the bushes in front of the house for now. All told, it's a cheerful display at happy hour and the lizards are not lonely any more.

Shuffle your feet

When you are walking along the surf line, shuffle your feet so you don't step on a stingray and get stung. Likewise when you are walking around the house, shuffle your feet so you don't step on a cat toy and lose your feet out from under you.

O Rose, thou art sick

Wednesday was a day of convergences. 

Rose is a food-driven cat. When I arrived home Tuesday afternoon she was moving slowly and showed no interest in eating. I checked the litter box for small pee balls, indicating a possible UTI, but there were none. I called the vet clinic and had her there within five minutes. Her blood work-up showed signs of renal dysfunction. She had fluids injected subcutaneously and we came home. Her appetite returned. She ate and went directly upstairs and curled up on our bed.

Nick never left Rose's side until the morning. He curled up at the foot of the bed and looked at her with worried, adoring eyes. Yes, a cat can do that. For three years she has slapped him and tumbled him and demanded that he yield his spot to her, and as a result he is devoted to her.

Wednesday morning I dropped Rose at the clinic so they could collect a urine sample from her. My heart was full as I drove to work because my thoughts were six hundred miles away with my family in Tennessee. It was the day of the funeral for Great Aunt Zilpha, the gentle and quiet one hundred year old Rock of Gibraltar for several generations of Sharps and Darks. For years I have been ready to jump when the call came, and she endured, and when the call came I could not find a way.

I knew I would be listening to Shakespeare all day. My students had memorized Hamlet's meditation on existence. Though they are not one hundred, they spoke with understanding. Aunt Zilpha's answer to the question was emphatically "To be" and she gave that answer every day of her life. I thought of the time ten years ago when she stood next to a portrait of her parents and told me about them and their general store, and about her childhood in the village where she lived one hundred years, as if it were not so long ago, when it had been eighty years. I wanted to be one of the crowd that honored her on Wednesday.

Fifteen minutes of play

Play is a powerful calming agent. Two days ago I played with Nick as an intervention for his aggressive behavior with Daisy. I dangled the cat charmer, a fleece snake on a wand, while Nick ducked in and out of a carpet-covered barrel pulling on the end of the toy.

He has been chasing Daisy both inside and outside the house with new ferocity for a couple of weeks. We don't worry about a little hissing, but we were hearing full fledged screaming from Daisy as she cowered under furniture. It is true that Nick is just being a cat. He chases lizards and voles outside and that chasing transfers to Daisy. They used to chase for fun but then it turned into something else and made Daisy afraid. We are not going to stand by while Nick makes Daisy scream and slaps Frida on the head during food prep time. It sets everyone on edge and it is not what we want as a routine for our family, and so we discussed an intervention. Two days ago was an especially bad incident. After everyone calmed down, including me and my husband, I had time for play therapy with him. He has been gentle as a lamb ever since. Nick the lamb. Yesterday he went outside and there was no transfer to chasing Daisy. After he came in, he curled up on a pillow with Rose.

That's Nick on the right. I'm not sure who was there first and how the compromise was reached. This is how I found them. Rose keeps Nick in line with frequent reminders that he is not on top. She makes him move when he has a spot she wants to sit on. So naturally Nick has to assert himself with the other two cats.

We are Nick's second family. His first family returned him and kept his brother because he was "mean to the other cat." I don't know how they dealt with his aggression, but I can guess from his avoidance of hands and feet that it wasn't play therapy. I also know that we can work this out with Nick. He is here to stay. He is sweet and a joker. This chasing is something new to be nipped in the bud.

I know about play therapy intervention from an animal behaviorist we consulted years ago and from the cat expert on Animal Planet. Play together and have treats together. Fifteen minutes of play a day. But like the people who consult on TV with their cats from hell, we get busy and forget to work it into our day. It's good for the humans, too, relaxing and stimulating for the brain. I played again this morning after breakfast and all four of the cats joined in. It's a rainy day and I hope to ward off cabin fever. Cabin fever in cats is not pretty. We will make time for play and that will prevent a lot of grief.

Two days ago, seeing the dramatic results of a play session, I thought that this is what we need to do with aggressive nations. Make their leaders play for fifteen minutes a day to calm them down. Build in play time for soldiers and insurgents, and not with video games but building blocks. Then give everyone treats for good behavior, perhaps some chocolate and a cookie or a biscuit with their tea. It sounds simplistic but the best solutions often are.

Clutter

We clutter our view of the sky. There is so much to see. Clouds, stars, birds. We throw up telephone wires and buildings and forget to look up.

The return of Stripe

Stripe went missing for several days. Yesterday Frida was in a frenzy looking for him. She usually sings for half and hour to an hour every morning and carries Stripe around, but yesterday she sang all day. She was still singing as happy hour approached and stopped only to yearn for the cheese we were nibbling at sunset.

I spent about half an hour looking for Stripe during the morning and instead found eight or nine rubber balls and fuzzy balls under the corner cupboard in the living room, where they had been batted out of reach. I cleaned them off and Frida took up with several of them, one at a time, as substitutes for Stripe. I promised Frida that I would look more for Stripe the next day. She was inconsolable.

This morning Frida seemed to have forgotten about Stripe and was particularly interested in the rubber balls. Nevertheless, after my second cup of tea I fulfilled my promise to look for Stripe, an all out room-to-room top-to-bottom search with a flashlight. The first place I looked was our closet in the big bedroom. The cats are not allowed in the closet, so naturally their favorite game is trying to get into the closet. We keep a small stick in the track to keep them from pushing the sliding doors open.

As I had looked everywhere that Stripe is usually found around the house, the logical place to start the search seemed to be the closet that the cats can't get into. First I looked under the small chest of drawers where I keep my scarves and pajamas. No Stripe.

Next I looked among the shoes. No Stripe. As I was leaving the closet, the laundry caught my eye. Just to be thorough, because I said I would, I pulled the laundry to one side. There was Stripe at the bottom of the pile. I took him to Frida. She didn't swat him as she usually does when he has gone missing. Instead she ignored him and continued singing with the rubber ball. It's going to take a long time for her to forgive him for this desertion.

When it because clear that Frida was giving him the cold shoulder, my husband suggested we put him back in the puzzle box for her to find. That's how Stripe first came into our house, and it is fitting that his journeys always lead back to it.

This weekend's was not the most dramatic reappearance of a favorite toy in our house. That would have to be the time Bob found Lily's pet rope in his pocket as we ate Thanksgiving dinner. He had put it there as he tidied up the house about a year before, the last time he had worn that particular pair of festive green corduroy pants, and forgotten about it. Like Frida, Lily had to find other toys to sing to until the prodigal pet rope returned. 

Letters

I am finished writing letters of recommendation for this year. I was determined to write fewer and finish earlier, and I succeeded in doing both. Thanksgiving is two weeks away and I am done.

Writing the letters is time consuming and mentally tiring but I do get something out of it personally. I have a chance to reflect on the learning styles of the students and what works with them, so I can be a more effective teacher. Mainly I reflect on how interesting they all are as they practice formulating ideas and become confident in their own creative thinking, how much they care about each other and work as hard at relationships as schoolwork. These are the people who will be figuring out what to do about the rising sea level and the economy ten years from now. I believe they will make good choices.

What a difference a few degrees make

About a month ago, I noticed dramatic and rapid changes in the angle of sunlight falling through the windows of the house from day to day. The sun was not in my eyes in my office at this hour four days ago.

Temperatures also began to fluctuate, and as it cooled very slightly at night the gingers and vines began to turn yellow. In the flower beds, the plants that reseed themselves every year are quietly dropping leaves and seeds and fading out of sight as the roses, which don't like to sweat, are putting out leaves and blooming again.

That last development is dependent on the regular spraying with the rotten egg mixture that keeps the deer from biting, of course. She checks back regularly to mouth what is nibble-able.

Rain at last

A good rain last night as the cold front came through. We have had little rain during the last month as fall moved in. As the temperatures dropped, the butterflies have slowed down. I had become so accustomed to their gyrations around the passionflower vines that the lack of movement outside the windows seemed unnatural.

At the beginning of the summer, when the small oak tree fell on the mirabilis rose and the oak leaf hydrangeas, I thought the birdbath had escaped unhurt, but several weeks later the pedestal broke in half. It must have been cracked when the tree fell and the crack took a while to make its way across the concrete column. I hope there is some kind of glue that I can find to repair it. Meanwhile the birds are enjoying the bowl of the birdbath on the ground, held level by a branch from the tree that fell on it. The ground is where they expect a puddle of water to be anyway.

Dream

Don't tell your dreams until after breakfast. That's what my Kentucky man says. We live by that rule.

I'm watching Sleepless in Seattle as I do my work night chores. Jonah told his Dad his dream immediately. That would never happen in our house except under duress.

What counts as breakfast? A glass of juice. A bite of egg or sausage. We wake up ready to tell the story of the night we spent in the same bed yet so far apart in our sleeping minds.

A hard head and a gentle hand

Requirements for teaching high school...

The live oak tree

Trees are smart and strong in slow, subtle ways. They send their branches where there is sun, and they send their roots into the flower beds for water. If they could repel an axe, they would rule the world.

A live oak grows on the north side of our house, and for years we had to get the branches trimmed back from the roof because it put all its energy into growing toward the south. It had competition from two other live oaks, both growing in neighbors' yards, one to the northeast and one to the northwest. Then in 2004, three of the big storms came through Gainesville. The northwest live oak lost a big branch that fell into our back yard, and it knocked one of our linden oaks so hard that it had to be taken down too. Next the northeast live oak's roots couldn't hold the waterlogged ground, and it came down altogether, again falling into our yard, across the driveway. It grazed our live oak, taking off some bark, then fell with its branches delicately missing all the coonties and camellias I had planted in the shade. It also missed my husband. He had just pulled into the driveway and parked his car. He was about to get out of the car when he noticed a shower of raindrops on his windshield. He thought it was starting to rain again, and then he saw the tree. It was not rain but water from the leaves of the oak as it fell right where he had just come up the driveway a few seconds before. If our oak tree had not deflected its fall, the northeast oak would have fallen on the parking area as well as the driveway.

Since that year, I have watched as the tree healed its bark and put more energy into growing toward the opening in the canopy. Even more remarkable, we no longer need to have the branches over the roof trimmed. The tree is balancing itself. I can't imagine the strength required of the wood of its branches in order for it to reach for the light, but I am grateful for that strength, since it grows right over our bedroom, and I hope it will thrive for many years to come.

Window watching

Most of the time when I look out the windows I see the same butterflies and birds doing their usual thing. Sometimes I look out and see something astonishing. A week ago, I saw a bluebird and his lady on the birdbath. Bluebirds prefer the yards with large expanses of grass, so I was surprised to see them come to take a bath and drink in our fairly small clearing. They probably come quite often, but I happened to be looking that time. While they were there, a hummingbird came by for a drink but flew off when he saw the bigger birds already on the bath. When the bluebirds flew away, two cardinals came immediately, just as the hummingbird made another pass and again flew off to a nearby branch to wait. The birdbath needed an air traffic controller that morning.

I get a lot of pleasure out of watching the birds go about their business. On the weekends we sit on the porch and watch them come and go at the feeders and baths. It's especially rewarding to see the shy ones when they think no humans are around, like the bluebird and his lady, and the indigo bunting I saw early in the spring.

A few minutes ago I looked out at the birdfeeders and there were the usual suspects and someone I had never seen before. He was the size and shape of a nuthatch and his markings were striking. Not the nuthatch I have seen many times in the woods-- this was a red-breasted nuthatch. I just added another bird to my life list. That's exciting even after all these years of birdwatching.

Knock, knock. Who's there?

The deer is not alone. Last night we were awakened by the loud hunting call of a coyote-- a long howl and three short barks, three times in a row, then a few small barks, possibly an answer from another coyote. It was very close to the house but avoided the motion detector lights. I knew all of our cats were inside the house, but I felt a stab of doubt just the same. Although it was dark, I looked out the window and checked the stairs and front hallway for the cats. They were not looking out the front windows as they usually do when there are animal visitors in the yard. Then I immediately thought of the little cat next door who lives on a screened porch. Could a coyote break in through a window screen?

With all the wildlife in our yard, the coyote would have rabbits, possum, raccoon, and deer to choose from without even beginning on pets. We have other predators too-- bobcat, fox, owls-- all these things are milling around in the woods and across the lawns at night. From the nibbled state of two of the roses, I can tell this morning that the deer has been visiting, because I didn't spray the organic untasty spray on them last week. She is vigilant, so I will have to be also.

After the coyote called, I lay wide awake for a long time. I didn't expect to be able to sleep after that, and I was safely comfortable in bed in a house; it was an instinctive reaction to the presence of a predator. However, I know I went back to sleep because at dawn I woke up to the sounds of a cat throwing up. I had to smile at the irony of the two disturbances.

This morning we played a recording of a coyote howling to confirm that that was the sound we heard. I had just set down the cats' breakfast and the smallest one, Daisy, bolted and could not be coaxed back to eating. Nicky ran too but he came back to his plate after a couple of minutes. Daisy is the one who was abandoned on a dirt road with her sister and nieces and nephews. She knew exactly what that sound was. I spoke to the neighbor and was relieved to hear that the little cat stays inside at night.

We let the cats outside later than usual and they did their rounds before lunchtime, well past the transition between night and day. Tonight is the night before school starts, so it would be nice if it is a night of good sleep and not one full of animal sounds like last night.

Roses and friends

A deer has been eating my roses for years. I have seen her only twice, but I know she is a regular visitor from the condition of my roses. Throughout the year I fertilize, add new mulch, and water the roses. New leaves and buds come quickly in response to the care. I am lulled into thinking the deer has moved on. Then all of a sudden, there are only bare twigs.

I understand the deer's repeated assaults on the antique roses that have no thorns-- Duchess de Brabant and Madame Joseph Schwartz, Le Duchet, La Marne, Mutabilis (the one the tree fell on), St. David, Louie Philippe, and the little unnamed sport of Cecile Bruner. Roses taste good. But this summer I realized the deer is also eating the Altissimo, which has monstrous thorns, and the Alachua Red Climber, which has little ones. The only roses she doesn't like at all are the Mermaid and the Cherokee, and those are the only roses I wish she would eat, because they are so vigorous that they need frequent trimming. Several years ago, The Duchess de Brabant stopped growing on the side most accessible to the deer, and instead grew up into the Mermaid for protection. Smart rose.

A month ago, desperate after years of trying this and that remedy, I purchased an organic spray and began applying it once a week. The roses have leaves again, and even a few blooms.

Nary a squint

Frida's eye looks better than it has looked in months. I left town for a few days just after she was released from medication, and my husband told me she wasn't even squinting a little. The eye drops themselves had caused discomfort to her eye and irritation to the skin around the eye. Within a couple of days, her eye and skin had revived with their own normal moisture.

She is perky and happy. She sticks up for herself at mealtime when the other three pace around with her, waiting for the food to be set down. She enjoys sleeping on the daybed on the porch, even in the afternoon sun. When dark falls, she watches for us to sit down to watch tv. Sometimes she will move to the den before we get there, or a few minutes after, and on Monday nights when we leave the house for a few hours, she is waiting there for us when we get home. If we take her up to bed with us, she stays all night. If we don't, she sleeps in her favorite downstairs places. For an eighteen year old cat with herpes and a bum eyeball, she's doing pretty well.

The timing of her recovery was perfect. I had a window of summer where I could devote all my time to her care. Then I left for a family reunion, and it was a relief to know she was out of danger.

No more collar, no more meds.

The new doctor delivered the good news with a pleasing repetition and a soothing rhythm. No more collar, no more meds. I went for Frida's recheck fully expecting a continued tapering off of eyedrops and ointment. That was the treatment plan I had been led to expect at the last recheck. Because she is being treated at a teaching hospital, Frida has had three teams of residents and students, but with the same teaching faculty monitoring her progress from behind the scenes, like the Great Oz.

A new note was entered in her discharge papers... "Frida is a great patient. Thank you for being committed to her care." They know the medication regimen I followed to achieve this, but they have only glimpsed how sweet Frida was in complying. No scratching, no biting, very little flinching and shrugging... a "merp" here and there and a grumpy look. The kitten we found by the fish cleaning station across the street knows a good deal when she sees one.

Zombie Lexus

My husband drives I-75 for 30 miles each day that he works, twice. He has been talking about the crazy driving since last weekend. I figured it is due to the holiday tomorrow, and also due to the thunderstorms that have been moving through all day every day for over a week. Until today, I attributed it to people being in a hurry to beat the rain, or get errands done before that cookout on July 4. Then today I met the Zombie Lexus and realized things are far worse than I had thought.

I was on my way to an appointment. Things were going well. The stove top is replaced. The kitchen faucet is fixed. The upstairs air handler blower motor is replaced. The motorcycle emergency is past. The kitchen sink disposal can wait; I don't put scraps down the sink anyway. The plumbing leak in the downstairs ceiling can wait; we don't have to use that bathtub. The cat's eyeball is healing and saved from enoculation for now. It's the middle of the summer. I have a family reunion coming up in a couple of weeks. My head was in a good place. Suddenly a dark blue Lexus sedan was in my lane, trying to merge with my front fender. I slammed on the brakes, hoping not to get rear ended. She had changed lanes without looking to avoid braking for a car turning left. She just kept coming. I sounded my horn. She kept coming. I held the horn. Finally, when she had completed her lane change, she heard me, saw me, and raised a genteel hand, like a queen wave, to acknowledge me. I was jangled out of my good mood.

I backed way off and changed into the other lane, the one she had come from. I would be turning left soon myself. Then, to my amazement, the Zombie Lexus deployed her left turn signal and pulled into the lane in front of me again. Some may call her a distracted driver, but there was no texting or talking on the phone happening in the Zombie Lexus. She was wrapped in something that held her to the center of her universe. She drove serenely to a trendy shopping center and parked. I felt I had witnessed something beyond the reach of law or meditation.

Cat's eye

Last night I set my alarm for midnight. When it went off, I set it for 1am and spent 15 minutes administering 3 different drops to our oldest cat Frida's left eye, with 5 minutes between each drop. At 1am, I set the alarm for 2am and spent 15 minutes dosing Frida's eye, and so the night went in increments of 35-40 minutes sleeping and 15 minutes dosing. Soon I hope to take a nap. The results of this aggressive medication were more encouraging than expected this morning when the doctor rechecked Frida's eye.

Frida called us up from across the street in 1995. She was about 6 months old, we were told by the young veterinarian who had just opened her practice in a town center near our house. Our neighbor and fishing friend had a fish cleaning station outside his house, a stainless steel sink salvaged from a local deli. Frida found it and stuck to it like glue. Bob heard her calling. He told me he heard something and went to investigate. I followed him by a couple of minutes and saw this tiny pale cat looking up at my husband, and he was looking down at her. We took her back to our house and fed her and started calling pet rescue organizations. They sent us to the young vet who was running a special on the surgery and vaccination package that the pet rescue required. The next morning, my husband, who has severe allergies to dogs and a little less reaction to cats, said, "Let's keep her." We had found homes for lost cats and kittens before. But they hadn't called him up personally, like Frida did, and they didn't have a creamy belly with tan spots on the underside and pale pastel tortoiseshell hair everywhere else. They didn't a pointy tale so flea bitten that the hair never grew back straight over patches of the tip. They weren't artistic in the litter box, like Frida, raking the clay into garden formations.

In 2006, Frida's recurring corneal ulcers led to a series of procedures that didn't work and instead resulted in a nasty sequestrum, a black scab that a veterinary professor deftly sliced off, leaving Frida's cornea thinner and more likely to be dry and irritated by allergens. But she was declared cured and a follow up corneal graft was not deemed necessary. Now she has an ulcer for the first time since that surgery, along with a destructive infection that is making it hard for her eye to heal the ulcer, even though it has formed blood vessels reaching toward the ulcer just as it did before. After yesterday's afternoon and night of vigilant medicating, the infection is losing ground and the ulcer is already smaller. I was fully prepared to face the removal of the eye, after putting Frida through months of medication all those years ago. I knew that if the ulcer was not halted quickly, it would break through her already thin cornea and she would lose the eye painfully and dangerously. I also know that we have limited resources for expensive procedures and hospitalization, which is why I dosed her myself through the night.

It's not over yet, but the eye has gained some ground against the baddies, and that's nice because appliances and vehicles have been breaking at a dizzying pace around our house this summer. It takes more than a call to the plumber to fix a broken cat, but it is the most important repair we have to undertake right now.

Another mystery solved

From time to time, our smallest cat Daisy shows up with small scratches on her face and ears. She's not getting them from rough play with the other cats. Yesterday as I was walking through the back yard, I saw her jump right up into the larger branches of the Mermaid rose that grows over a trellis in the back yard. The Mermaid is near both bird feeders and there are two ground level bird baths near it, so its good shelter is something smaller birds like the wrens, cardinals, titmice, and chickadees take advantage of. Daisy was chasing a bird and now has a fresh scratch on one ear. She is not so small as a wren, but almost as nimble, and the Mermaid has big thorns.

Two weekends two bikes

The past two weekends have been given over to motorcycle shopping with the husband. After researching bikes that would meet his preferences, he went to the local Triumph dealer last weekend, knowing that he would have to go out of town to look at the BMW model that interested him. He read the rider forums, read the company websites, read the reviews, and looked over specifications and weighed options until he was fully prepared with questions. I've seen him shop before; he is an artist.

He spent the week talking to two other dealers and set up a test ride for the top three bike candidates today. Sitting on a bike in the showroom can only give so much information. All of my own bikes have been purchased with the same rigorous research but no test ride, because I was a new rider at the time and back then you just didn't get a test ride. Things have changed. I knew the test rides would be revealing, but it wasn't until he talked to his riding buddy that the choices became clear to him.

We have both been dedicated Buell riders for years, but Buells for the common man are no more, and so my husband is moving on. I did not realize that I would have feelings about this transition... how much we had committed to the company until I realized, at the end of today's investigations, that this really would be goodbye to my husband's big Buell. I will still have my little Lightning for a while, until I see that I am getting close to the day the HD dealer says... sorry, we can't work on your Buell any more. I certainly can't work on it myself. What an oddity Buells are... the only American made sport bike, tinkered by a German designer from Sportster engines, small and light (until the Ulysses, of course), nimble, innovative.

The ultimate choice was a sleeper, a bike he had not even considered until last weekend when he saw it at the local Triumph dealer. So it was down to two bikes, the Triumph Tiger 800 and the Yamaha FJR, and he rode the Yamaha last. While the Tiger was fun and comfortable, the FJR was hard to argue against for a man with a 90 mile commute and a thirst for a road trip.

Where someone has gone before

Gardening in the shade led me to work across the driveway from the front door, where my mother's English ivy and Virginia creeper are working together to cover my plantings-- Big Blue liriope, dwarf Walter's virburnam, white crinum lilies, and a venerable rosemary bush that I planted soon after we moved into the house in 2002. The rosemary succumbed to a wet summer last year and died. It's feet were in clay and soil that had been very dry. When we moved in, there were some very sad little azaleas that had been planted there in unimproved soil with not much mulch, too much sun, and not enough water. The rosemary thrived for years because the soil drained well, but then it didn't after the vines moved in.

Early on in today's clearing I found a credit card. About twenty minutes later I found another one. Both belonged to the same person; one had expired in 2011 and the other in 2012. After a little phone book research I found her, living around the corner from me. I called and left a message, and she called back about an hour later. Two years ago her purse had been stolen from inside her car, which was inside her garage, with the garage door open. Her purse was found soon after at another neighbor's house, but she wondered what had happened to the credit cards. The odd thing was not so much that a crew had been working the neighborhood two years ago, looking for open doors, but that they had left what they didn't want well up into other neighbors' yards. Both the purse and these credit cards were not down by the street; they were up long driveways near the front door. Interesting MO.

Two years ago when this crew came by, our house was locked and the alarm system was on. They left two calling cards, but I didn't find them until today.

Green mulch

Representative of the general condition of the neglected flowerbeds in the front yard, here is my bed of shame. These are all native vines... Carolina jessamine, grapevine, Virginia creeper... the victory of clearing them out of the beds is bittersweet because they are native and natural, but they have no restraint.

Here are the few square yards I have cleared from the vines and replaced the green mulch with pine straw and pine bark. What was green is now brown. Soon my yard will look like every other yard in the neighborhood.

The suggestible and redirectible passionflower vine. This is a hybrid magnificent purple reaching from a trellis to a large sasanqua camellia. Very well behaved.

I have three passionflower vines growing in my garden-- the large exotic smelly purple, the native blue that grows on Payne's Prairie, and this little red, Lady Margaret.

Nap time

Rosie and Daisy napping during the thunderstorm. The storm has passed now but they are still napping.

Return of the rain

I spent the morning redirecting passionflower vines in the vegetable bed-- forgot to mention them among the rogue's gallery of vines yesterday as they are not part of the problem in the front flower beds-- the vegetable bed is the newest  bed and gets more attention than the other beds. Trumpet flower vine tries to come over from the woods but I pull the roots where I can find them. There is very little Virginia creeper in the vegetable bed and even less after this morning. I have several trellises for the passionflower vine and I let it grow on a couple of big sasanqua camellias as well. The passionflower vine is not as much of a problem as the other vines, and it is easy to persuade it to grow in the direction I want it to go. The caterpillars eat it and in winter the leftover vines dry up and fall apart by themselves. I pulled just a few passionflower vines that were coming up in problematic places, like the Alachua Red Climber rose trellis, the Sweet One Hundred cherry tomato cage, and the mystery cherry tomato cage. I'm pretty sure the mystery cherry tomato will turn out to be a black cherry tomato. The seedling came up next to the strawberry plants and I let it grow. It's vigorous and the tomatoes are big, even bigger than the tomatoes on the plant that stood in that spot last year. One fruit started to change from green this morning.

After Tropical Storm Andrea came through, we have had several days without rain. Now a storm is moving in from the west. I had come in for brunch, and because my neighbor was kicking up noise and smoke with his lawn mower, when I heard the thunder. The light has dropped quickly in the past ten minutes, and now it looks like a cloudy twilight outside the windows. The rain has just started now.

I also devined the last and most heavily covered pine tree in the front yard. Carolina jessamine had formed a beautiful mass about twenty feet up. It bloomed gloriously in January. It will not stay there, however, and it is joined by grapevine and Virginia creeper, and all of them are growing over the camellias next to the tree. If it is too wet to work in the yard after the storm passes, I will resume the destruction tomorrow. I also have my eye on a grapevine that is covering my buckthorn saplings, growing over onto them from my neighbor's hedge. Buckthorn is one of my favorite trees. We first became aware of it when we discovered it growing in our previous house's back yard, and I have loved it ever since. I will let it grow just about anywhere it sprouts. Beautiful leaves and demure little berries that the birds love. It's a great understory tree, very sweet.

Everything's still vine, but not as vine as before

As I was devining the trees in the front yard, I reflected that, while I'm amused and poking fun at Daisy's shenanigans, she deserves credit for her skills. She survived abandonment on a dirt road with her sister, who had a broken pelvis, and her sister's six kittens. With her sister injured, it was probably Daisy who got them anything to eat and kept the kittens from wandering off-- Aunt Daisy. She was barely a year old when she was rescued and we adopted her from our animal clinic. The kittens were adopted rapidly because they were at the ultra cute age and had beautiful coloring, and her sister healed and was adopted too. Whereas Daisy is brown and orange tabby with white paws, her sister was grey tabby, much more uniformly patterned. Daisy has more orange on one hind leg than the other, one shoulder orange and the other not, and a slightly off-center blaze on her asymmetrical orange nose. She's unusual inside and out.

I have come to the painful realization that even the vines I love have to go. They are beautiful and lush and completely out of control. The last time I asked my arborist to take down a tree, it took him five weeks and several phone calls to finally do it. The tree was just at the edge of the woods and covered with trumpet vine and virginia creeper. I don't blame him at all for avoiding it. Vines make the job complicated and dangerous.

I like the things I have planted in the yard and would like to be able to see them-- coonties, camellias, sego palms, daylilies, azaleas-- but I can barely see them through the vines. Virginia creeper, Carolina jessamine, smilax, Singapore skunk vine, wild clematis, English ivy from my mother's garden, variegated ivy from gardening friends-- it all has to be pulled. I will keep a small patch of the ivy in a place where I can keep it off the trees. I'll keep my mother's species clematis on the trellis; it's much more cooperative than these other vines. I planted the Carolina jessamine near pine tree in the front yard, innocently thinking it would just grow up the tree. It grew everywhere except up the tree. It spread all over the flower bed and grew up through the camellias and I pulled it all years ago, and then it came back and covered everything on the ground again and finally grew up the pine trees. The time has come for the jessamine to go.

Hunting 2

Daisy's indoor hunting continues to bring adventure her way. Just a few minutes ago she faced down a dangerous snake on the kitchen counter. She hopped up onto the stool next to the counter to keep my company as I was taking a water break. All of her instinctive defenses came into play instantly. She arched her back and watched without blinking. The counter was not empty. There was a pan upside down drying on a tea towel. At first I thought it was the pan that surprised her, but next I observed that her attention was fixed on the tea towel. The design of the towel's one inch border features alternating black and red stripes, loosely printed so that some white shows through here and there.

Daisy reached out a paw and touched the edge of the towel lightly and quickly, then drew her paw back, then touched again, and once again without drawing her paw back this time, having determined that the tea towel was already dead. Only then did her body relax and she lay down on the stool with her head resting on one splayed out foreleg, as if nothing had happened. In a sense, I suppose nothing did happen, but if it had she knew what to do.

Hunting

Daisy's hunting skills are improving. She has successfully removed tomatoes and blueberries from the kitchen counter and batted them all over the house. She can even get blueberries out of a tea cup, but not when the tea cup has been tucked away inside the cabinet. Fortunately for the wild life in the yard, she can't catch a bird, squirrel, or butterfly, but a couple of lizards have lost their tails.

Gardening in the shade

Gardening in the shade is the only possibility in ninety degree weather. If the day is overcast, I can work anywhere in the yard, but on a sunny day it's easy to get heat stress. So I follow the shade. Today I finished clearing the piles of vines that came down with the tree during the storm. Then I moved to the front of the house, where Virginia creeper grows up through the azaleas. I got most of the big roots and spread mulch. I'll get what's left another day. I cleared the vines back in the fall, but I did not do a good job of getting roots until today. Even the smilax vine I dug up previously came back from a couple of little pieces of the root that I missed in the fall. As the shade moves around throughout the day, eventually I will get to each area that needs attention.

Singing

Frida has been taking a joint health supplement for a week now. Last night something extraordinary happened. During a prolonged and stentorian episode of singing and carrying Stripe Mouse around the tv room and kitchen, she hopped into a cardboard box containing tissue paper that we keep next to the tv, Stripe and all, looking like a three year old. Frida is eighteen. It's not unusual for her sing and carry Stripe around for a half hour or an hour after breakfast and dinner, but this song lasted over two hours and was especially ear-splitting. She has never shown any interest in the box before. Daisy sits in the box, and Rose sits in the box, and last week I started sprinkling a little catnip in the box as well as on the catnip rug, which is a bath rug in front of the fireplace. Frida hopped in and out of the box with Stripe several times. I felt as if I were watching someone else's cat in a video posted on YouTube, but it was my own sedentary Frida showing us that "there's a dance in the old dame yet," to quote Mehitabel, another cat indulging in kittenish antics at a ripe old age.

Nibbling

This morning I looked out the breakfast room window and there was the rabbit, looking around the part of the paisley bed where the little sport of Cecile Bruner rose used to be. The mutabilis rose that got crushed by the tree is nearby, so it consoled itself by eating a few leaves of mutabilis that were now within its reach. The rabbit avoids the front of the house, so it is unlikely to discover Cecile's new location any time soon. The mutabilis is holding up pretty well, and yesterday was a hot day that would test its ability to get moisture up to its leaves with a split trunk.

Weather or not...

Storm preparedness for Tropical Storm Andrea is under way at our house.

Flooding may occur in low lying areas: Earlier this afternoon, I was feeling complacent about the possibility of 35 knot winds. The forecast is usually more dramatic than the weather that comes. I turned on the Weather Channel and got out the Cat Charmer to entertain the two young cats. For some reason this stimulation sent Nick careening into the water bowls with much crashing and splashing as a result. I mopped up a half gallon of water with a towel, thinking this may not be the end of water tonight.

Loose objects may become dangerous projectiles in high winds: Even with close observation, you don't really know how many birds are coming to your feeders until you take them down. Right now the chickadees, titmice, downy woodpeckers, and cardinals are teaching their fledgelings how to gather food. That includes our feeders. I will remount the feeders in the morning when the storm has passed and they will be clean and full. Wild birds do not depend on feeders alone, so it is a temporary inconvenience.

I also moved the trash cans and hose reels and one three foot tall cone shaped wrought iron trellis. The house has plenty of tarps and lanterns and batteries, water purification and a cook stove and fuel. I hope it will just be a quiet Thursday night with some bands of wind and rain moving through, but one never knows. In 2004 we lost power as three hurricanes moved through. I read my students' literary journals by the light of an REI camp light. We lost a cat too; I think I've told that story in this blog before. If the worst that happens tonight is that I unnecessarily moved things, then I will feel the force of luck once again.

Meanwhile, the mutabilis rose that got crushed yesterday is holding itself up a little higher today. In other news, the sport of Cecile Bruner that I moved a few days ago has put out one new leaf a day for a total of three-- with the encouraging humidity and rain and cloud cover we have had with the storms moving through, transplants are getting a lucky break.

discipline

Tomatoes have no self control. We have had several inches of rain in the past two days. The tomatoes will drink and drink and the fruit may split their skins.

That's in the front garden. In the back garden, a tree fell today while I was at work. It missed the birdbath that was an anniversary present from my husband, but it fell on the mutabilis rose bush that is about five or six years old. The main trunk is split into three. I spent about an hour pulling vines and pieces of the tree off the rose, pruned it a little and said words of encouragement. I hope it can heal itself.

The students are gone and today and tomorrow are just work without them. Today I organized and culled the books in my classroom. Tomorrow I will work on files. I hope to show more discipline and save myself countless hours searching for things I did not file properly the year before. It is also time to discard old material that will not be used again. Its parking meter has run out. One has to be in the right mood for this sort of cleaning and I am.

pirouette

Not long after my last post, the last hatchling to leave the nest flew off. Archie had been flirting with leaving the ledge since before his nestmates had left, flapping vertically and horizontally and windowwise like Judson. After a long engagement, he finally consummated late in the day today. My Sunday Times is still unwrapped and unread because I was following the nest cam and live on the ground with Urban Hawks.

I say not long, but the truth is that followers online and on the ground spent hours upon hours this weekend following the hawks. In a rural environment, hawks would not need humans watching over them. In an urban environment, perhaps the same is true, but it is also true that there are so many variables that many pairs of eyes and hands can help protect the hawks from the dangers we have created. So, let it be and let it be as is.

Side stepping and flying forward

I moved a small rose bush this morning. It's a sport of Cecile Bruner, just a little smaller flower. For over a year I have been trying to stop the bunnies and deer from eating it and I finally gave up and moved it. Any time it grew a few leaves and gained more than six inches in height, they would eat it back. It was actually trying to grow sideways to avoid the nibblers. It also had a lot of root competition from nearby trees. They know where I am watering regularly and send in the roots. I hope it will have a chance to grow now. It's near the front door. It's not a retreat exactly, more of a side step.

By far the most exciting thing happening this weekend is the fledging of the Washington Square hawks. The oldest of the three, Kiku, left the nest around 10:30 Friday morning. By the time I got home that afternoon, there were lots of pictures and videos of her flying around from cars to street then from building to building. This morning she has made her way back to the park from the side street she was exploring and her parents brought her food. Before many people were up this morning, however, the youngest Judson had fledged just before 5:30. No one seems to have captured it on film, but two members of the chat group witnessed his departure. Now the middle hatchling Archie is alone in the nest having lunch. She seems interested in leaving, practicing her jumping and flapping, but she hasn't taken the plunge yet. To see a hatchling fledge live... that would be mountain top (in honor of anniversary of Hillary's climb). I have only seen pictures and video of the previous fledges. It's the most amazing thing to see first flight. Everything depends on the success of the first landing.

Watching the NYU hawk cam is an experience that is hard to describe. I have watched since Mother's Day two years ago, when Violet and Bobby hatched one egg, Pip. I thought he was named for Dickens' hero until this year, when I learned that pipping is what they call the first breaking through of the egg tooth through the egg. After Pip was successfully independent, Violet succumbed to her leg injury, caused by a metal banding loop. Rosie appeared within a few days in Bobby's territory, and last year they raised two chicks, Boo and Scout.

This third nest has been entertaining as Bobby and Rosie mature as a couple and as parents. Bobby has always brought sticks to the nest, sometimes imperiling the chicks, and last year a plastic bag notoriously wrapped around a chick dangerously for several days. This year, Rosie has brought twigs with green leaves regularly. Kiku ate voraciously, Archie second voraciously, as we all worried that Judson wasn't getting enough food when in fact he was doing quite well, thank you very much. He always seemed to be off to the side looking the other way while Kiku and Archie did everything together. One morning, while the hatchlings were still quite young, Bobby brought a newspaper to the nest, and he and Rosie together worked it over and then under the chicks, until they were three little white downy heads bobbing around in a newspaper boat. A sense of play and fun has been the characteristic of this year's nest. Judson flew at the window repeatedly instead of across the ledge like the other two. It was his way-- always the other way.

I watch afternoons, nights, and weekends. I love to watch them sleeping in the nest. There is never audio and at night the camera changes from color to black and white. It is serene. Among the hundreds of people who watch, only a few make comments on the chat side bar, among them hawk expert John Blakeman who teaches us patiently about hawk biology and behavior. They are funny and friendly, warmly welcoming fellow birders, mostly from New York but also watching like me from afar-- New Jersey, Missouri, South Carolina, California, Boston, Hong Kong, Australia, and several of us in Florida. We tease each other and make terrible puns. When we get rowdy, our typing is atrocious. I feel as if I have about two dozen friends whom I have never met.

In previous years, we have had Roger Paw's photos from the park as well as the nest cam. Now we also have Urban Hawks' photos and live streaming from the park. GhentArt's screen captures on YouTube have kept me from being so forlorn at work, as I can watch his clips but not the nest cam during the day. It has become a much richer experience for those of us who can't walk around the park in person. Some day I hope to make a pilgrimage to Washington Square Park, join a meet up at the fledge bench, and thank them in person for making this experience possible and welcoming all of us into the company of the hawk watchers at the park.

Little things 2

I found my button. It was right in the middle of the walkway where I had looked two dozen times. Having bounced and scooted around for thirty-six hours, it was ready to be back home on its pants.

Little things

A series of little things tried to dampen the mood of the three day weekend, without success. One can only laugh when they pile up this this.

Yesterday morning as I left for work, I decided to run back into the house for an extra book to read during the AP Physics C exam. As I stepped onto the front walk way, I heard the "ping" of a metal button popping off of my pants and hitting the walkway. I looked all over my pants, couldn't see a missing button, looked all over the walkway and into the mulch, couldn't see a button lying there. It's basically mulch colored so well camouflaged. So I went to work and looked again when I came home. Only then did I find the back pocket flap was missing a button.

My husband was getting ready to leave on a two week trip. The new all weather floor mats I ordered for him arrived a day early, but when he opened the box around 4pm they did not fit at all. The company had sent the wrong size. I called them at 4:30 and they shipped the right size and arranged the wrong size to be picked up next week before they left for the day.

Around 5pm the kitchen sink faucet handle broke off. My husband had repaired the inner workings of the faucet a couple of years ago, and the repair held well until yesterday, when it began to be difficult to shut off, and then the pin that holds the handle gave way. My husband got the water to stop running and we salvaged what we could of our plans to have a relaxing evening together by going out for dinner.

This morning I finally convinced my husband that I wanted to have a plumber replace the faucet and for him to start driving as he had originally planned before all the things that didn't fit and broke played their parts. The plumber answered the phone at 7:20, we bought a faucet at 8, and he arrived to begin repairs at 8:40. He dealt with a little setback under the sink (shut off valve was an odd arrangement, so he fixed that as well) and I was writing him a check at 10.

I'm going out to look for my button again. The way the other little things turned around, it just might be there this time.

The big thing is for my husband to have a safe drive to Kentucky.

Smart girl

This morning my cat Rosie showed her astute understanding of human behavior twice. She tilted her head helpfully for me to apply gel to her left ear, while I absent-mindedly tried to apply it to her right ear. She firmly held her head with the left ear forward and I finally figured it out. Left at light, right at night.

After I fed her breakfast and had my own, I had to run errands--not my usual Saturday morning routine. As I grabbed my wallet, I saw that Rosie had positioned herself next to the laptop, ready for a morning of watching the NYU hawk cam together (well, me watching and her squeezed in to a space behind the laptop slightly too small for her).

Smart girl.

gros

Most of the spring migration seems to be done. The goldfinches left over a week ago. One day they were here, draining the seed silos daily, and the next day they were gone. In the void they left, I have been seeing the catbirds, indigo buntings, bluebirds, brown thrashers, and the usual suspects. Bob saw a tanager yesterday, and today he spotted a male rose breasted grosbeak on the rose trellis. He called me to the window and I got to see it too.

I have been pulling vines today. First, a bag full of poison ivy that had grown out into the grass from the woods. The wind kicked up and I decided one bagful was enough. I don't like to pull it when the wind is blowing. Then I turned to the grapevine and virginia creeper growing out into the paisley bed, where we later saw the grosbeak. If I tackle one little area each weekend, I can dare to hope that I'll get the garden back from the vines some day.

Meanwhile spring advances.

Curses

Today I was cursed in two languages I don't speak-- cat and hummingbird. Even a seven pound cat deserves some dignity. When she is engrossed in chasing a squirrel for hours on end, I do pick her up and bring her in for dinner. She called me a four letter word I had not heard before. Some day she may catch a squirrel, although they are not much smaller than she is, she is that fierce.

The hummingbird was busy chasing a lady and having a snack at the feeder and skimming by the justicia bush just where I was watering in some mulch. It got into a little spray. Normally this would not be a problem, but is was 50 degrees and dropping.  Tonight is projected to go down to 32 degrees for a couple of hours. The forecasts have been accurate lately. Even though it is after St. Patrick's Day, I do not want to take chances. I covered the purple crinum lilies because they get so disgusting when they are frost bitten, like alien mucus on a stalk.

I covered the butterfly weed because, beyond all hope, I am still waiting for the monarchs to come back. The monarchs are getting it on both ends. Food supply eradicated in the bread basket states in this country, thanks to GMO crops sprayed with herbicide, and habitat destruction in Mexico thanks to logging. I remember only four years ago when our house and the bushes out front were covered with little blue monarch chrysalises all summer long. The change happened overnight. Instead of a steady stream of munchers all year long, only half a dozen. What have we lost, besides a curious phenomenon? Pollinators. If you need a self-interested motivation, there it is. I notice a distinct difference in which plants are getting pollinated and reseeding themselves in the garden.

Personally, I don't need a reason to want the monarchs and African elephants to survive. I don't need to see them myself. I just want them to be there, somewhere, out there, living their diverse lives. I would like to see more tolerance for diversity in our world.

spring break ritual

Today I observed a ritual that has been part of my spring break for the past three years. Instead of pulling weeds and vines in beds already established and tragically overgrown, I dug up perfectly vigorous clumps of St. Augustine grass that had survived my campaign of near-neglect (one to two feedings a year and no watering) in order to expand the bed in the side yard where I plant most of my herbs and vegetables.

Today was windy and sunny. The trees are putting on their new suits of clothes. At this time of day, the late afternoon light doesn't hit every leaf as it does at midday, so there are patches of brilliant chartreuse and tea green. As the minutes pass, the patches of tea green expand. Watching it change at the remains of the daylight from the porch is one of our chief pleasures.

I saw a red tailed hawk fledgeling make his first flight today. I heard an unfamiliar voice. His parent had been a regular for several weeks. But this voice was raspy and he wasn't flying so well. Then his parent flew over to where he was to check on him. They both got very quiet. A successful first flight. It's ironic because I had not looked at the Washington Square hawk cam or looked at Roger Paw's blog for a while until today. Last time I looked was in February, and Rosie and Bobby had just mated. Now they have three eggs. Of course New York is on a different schedule than north central Florida.

More about Things

A couple of points made in the NYT overview of Achebe's Things Fall Apart did show understanding of the novel's complexity, something which is easily lost in a superficial reading of Achebe's seemingly simple prose. Yes, it tells the story of colonization from the point of view of the invaded community. It is also true that the community is already experiencing change before the arrival of the colonial government; the elders comment that Okonkwo's breaking of the week of peace would have been severely punished in the past. Could any community be strong enough to withstand a determined invading force? The example of another village that stood up to the British is enough to convince the Umuofian elders that appeasement is the best approach. (They could not know about the Pueblo Revolt on the other side of the world.)

The other important point to make is that Okonkwo himself is not a typical Umuofian man. His attitudes toward women do not reflect the views of other men in his community. He is not an archetype; he is an individual. His friend Obierika takes a balanced and reasonable view of things. Okonkwo bashes against every problem with his fists. That said, Obierika is the right character to say what we feel when we have seen the whole shape of the narrative-- that Okonkwo is a great man.

Reading beyond Things Fall Apart usually leads to its sequel, No Longer at Ease. Of all the other novels Achebe wrote, I think Arrow of God comes to the closest to continuing the portrait of a village's choices in the face of colonial subjugation. With its focus on a man of peace and spiritual strength, rather than a man of war, it provides a good counterpoint to Things Fall Apart.

For an introduction to African literature, nothing beats the wrestling match in the first chapter of Things Fall Apart, when Okonkwo throws Amalinze the Cat. Read it out loud. 

Achebe

I'm not quite ready to talk about Achebe yet. I read Things Fall Apart during my first year of teaching, 1988-1989. I found it in the English department's paperback book closet. I realized at once that it was a story of great power, that it would speak to my all male tenth grade basic skills class, and that I would need to prepare myself with cultural background before I undertook it. I was too overwhelmed with the daily juggling act of four preparations across three grade levels and I lacked confidence in my vision that the sophomore boys would embrace the story. I did not teach the book until 1995 when I was asked to join a team where the curriculum was set in stone.

How I fell in love with teaching during that first year I am still trying to understand, but I did, and reading Things Fall Apart, having the dream of teaching it some day, was a big part of it. The fifteen years that I did teach it were magical. I later defended dropping the novel from the curriculum (formerly set in stone), year after year. The teacher who originated that curriculum dropped a casual comment as he left the parking lot for the last time. "Keep the ninth grade going," he said. We have not spoken since but his request stayed in my mind all these years. I saw that Things Fall Apart was the centerpiece. Everything else in the four years of our English program depended on it. Other works might come and go, but not the novel written in English by a Nigerian author with a title from Yeats... okay, this is where it gets complicated.

Rose knows tuna

She's making tuna salad for lunch. When she opens the can, she pours the juice on a big plate and we all get to lick. Then we get to lick the empty can. It's a recipe she brought back from her sister in Texas, many years ago when I was still small and young.

I'm so busy licking the plate that I don't always see everything she puts into the tuna salad, but I can smell the sweet pickle relish, the mayonnaise, and the green olives. The poppy seed jar is on the counter. I saw her putting the sliced almonds back in the cabinet. The grater has carrot on it. I smell celery.

It seems a shame to do all that to a decent chunk of tuna, but there it is. This kitchen is not run in a logical manner.

Canned prey

The quiet morning shifted into high gear when Daisy charged the bird feeder. She had been under a bush watching. All the birds flew up. I thought it was all over and called her to come in. She had been out for several hours and I didn't want her to make another attempt to catch a bird-- I thought that's what she was doing. I called and called but she wouldn't budge from the base of the bird feeder pole.

I called in the other cats, put on my outside shoes, and went to get Daisy manually. She is usually good about coming in when I call her. Not this time. As I got closer to the bird feeder, I understood why. A squirrel was turning the air blue from inside the raccoon baffle. It had run up the pole to get away from Daisy and was trapped in the can. I wonder how long Daisy would have waited for the squirrel to come down. The squirrel's head appeared looking out from the bottom of the baffle four minutes after I brought Daisy inside.

Spring songs

I have been listening all week. Listening to students, listening to birds. The birds have surprised me. (Some of the students surprised me too.)

All week, when I listened outside, I heard a song that drowned out all the others. It was a song of four notes. High low not so high and lower. I heard it at home on the southwest side of the county, and I heard it at school on the southeast side. On Friday, at last, after hearing it all week, I saw the singer. It was a Carolina Chickadee. All week I thought I was listening to an exotic warbler. I know the Chickadee's call. Chickadee dee dee. The bird who schooled me was at my house. As I watched him on a branch of the five year old redbud tree, I saw that he stretched himself up to his tallest profile and poured everything he had into his elongated throat. How could a Chickadee look so big? He was big with song.

I cannot look at a Chickadee ever again without thinking of my mentor, Eva Touster, who put a line in one of her poems, "My own, the tiny Carolina Chickadee." She taught me Ransom and Tennessee Williams. She taught me Oedipus the King and myself. I understand why she would think of a bird as her own, when the glimpse of its passion is so intimate and so fleeting. Everything I learned from her was like that, hard to hang onto and reverberating endlessly.

Poison ivy

We've had mild winter so the poison ivy is putting out leaves in a big way right now. It's not allowed in our living spaces in the yard, only in the woods. Yesterday I found two plants in the front yard. I pulled one and today I'm going to pull the other, or at least the part I can reach. It's growing on the fence and it starts under the hedge on the other side.

I spent this morning browsing gardenweb.com to see if there is any new wisdom about clearing poison ivy. All the threads were several years old. There was a lot of what I'll call folk lore on all of the threads. Spraying herbicides was widespread among the advice. Good way to kill everything else in the area.

My first battle with poison ivy was epic. When we moved in nine years ago, there were two huge vines out front, so thick at the base that they had to have been over five years old. I sprayed herbicide on it and killed the pine tree instead. Then I dug up the root, bagged up the vines, got a little on me at the wrists and treated it with Zanfel, which is expensive but works well. It is specifically designed to let you scratch the itch while it removes the urushiol from your skin. I got another rash the next time I wore the shirt I was wearing that day, so it is in the closet (because it was a gift from my mother) resting and waiting for the oil to break down. That takes ten years, I have heard.

After that, I was more cautious about how I dealt with poison ivy. My second battle was with a vine that had grown up into a live oak tree that started in my back yard neighbors' yard. I went over into their yard, with permission of course, cut the vine, and dug up the root. I washed my shovel and cross pruners with soap and that was that. I had not touched the vine itself.

On the edges of the woods, I put down a thick layer of oak leaves every spring, two to three feet wide, to create a barrier between the woods and the lawn. I get mixed results with that approach, but mostly it works until the leaves break down and the mulch barrier thins out.

I use layers of newspaper now when I find poison ivy in the flower beds. The New York Times is printed on good heavy paper and works well. I unfold the paper and use two layers with each pull, never reusing the paper, then wrap what I pull as quickly as possible into a ball inside the paper and put it into a trash bag.

For this poison ivy that is now growing up my side of the fence in the front yard, a dual platform approach is going to be necessary. I can pull what's on the fence and dump leaves on top of what's left and hope it will stop growing in my direction. There's light on the other side of the hedge, I'll tell it, go grow over there. If it doesn't listen to my advice, I'll look into brushing herbicide on the leaves, but that is my absolute last resort. Spraying is not going to happen in my yard.

Frida's new story

Cold City
Chapter One

It was a cold day in the city. Detective Stripe was on furlough under the couch. The dockets were piling up on his desk. He poured himself another cold one and lay back in the shade. "Let them see how much they need me," he thought, "let them feel what it means to be without the intellect of Stripe protecting the city."

To be continued...

Nick's kitty girlfriend

Saturday, March 9, 2013
Entry #1469

As I mentioned yesterday, I was feeling a little anxious because my people were away. I wasn't sure who would feed us dinner. It was Her. We all got a taste of a new can as well as the usual one with the blue stripe. That made me happy.

Today has been good. I got to go out early in the morning and the little flap door on the porch stayed open for hours. Suki came over. We hung out in the back yard but then Suki got anxious when She came out in the back yard to put seed in the tubes. Suki didn't run away this time like she usually does. She just went into the woods and sat on a fallen log. I was happy she didn't run home. We played it real cool while She was around. Suki lives behind our house. We met three weeks ago when she came up to the house and introduced herself. Suki gets along with Rose and Daisy, too, which is amazing. They are challenging. But there we were all right together there behind the house just getting along.

Well, I've been four years old for nine days, and I've been living here for two years and two and a half months. Whenever they take me to the clinic, they bring me back here, so I guess that's a good sign. Already I've been here twice as long as I was with my first people. I missed my brother a lot at first but now I get lap time with Him every morning after his shower, and its okay with my people if I roughhouse with Daisy and Rose. But not with Frida. That's a story for another day.

Daisy's Autobiography, Part I

To begin at the beginning, the legend tells that I was dumped on a dirt road with my sister and her 6 kittens. Someone found us, somehow, with my sister's pelvis broken and the 6 kittens and me in tow. She had all the dramatic elements and I had all the spunk. The kittens had all the cute. Whatever, it worked, and we all found good humans with food.

Rosie's first food column

She made chicken. I was there when she fixed it but I didn't get any. It was too hot and then she put it away in the cooler. Here's what she did.

Orange Sambal Chicken

Chicken breasts in a baking dish. Spoon olive oil onto the top. Then cut an orange, preferably red naval or blood orange, first cutting off the peel and then pulling the pulp from the sections into a small mixing bowl. Add a tablespoon of sambal paste, chopped fresh parsley leaves, diced capers, and add ground salt and pepper. Bake for 35 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool briefly, sample, and store.

Serve with steamed veggies, or chill and cut up to top a salad.

Either way, I won't get any. 

Where is Macau?

"Where is Macau?" has become a code phrase at our house since the night we saw "Skyfall" because it was one of the filming locations. This curiosity started a series of questions during which we tried to figure out the answer, not as artfully as the logic tennis match in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead but about as productive. I was pretty sure it was somewhere in Asia, not Africa, but that's about as close as we could get. Of course we looked it up later and I doubt I'll ever forget where it is now because the original conversation was so frustrating and hilarious. Now, any time we find ourselves in the same position-- two adults, neither with a smartphone, wanting basic information-- we say, "Where is Macau?"

This morning was one of those times. I was telling my husband that my nephew is hatching his first molar, and his mother is dreading the molars to come. My husband wondered if kittens go through teething in the same way the babies do. It turns out they do, but at the time we were getting ready for work and didn't have time to look it up. I responded that I didn't think there is much in the literature about it, and my husband mourned the paucity of literature written by cats. Things went downhill from there. If our cats could write, Rosie would have a food column, Frida would write mystery stories, and Daisy would write autobiography. Nick's therapist would tell him to keep a journal, and a typical entry would begin, "Feeling a little anxious today." It certainly helps to begin the day laughing.

When I got home from work, a flock of fish crows was flying overhead, another small source of delight. The first time we heard them was twenty-five years ago on a camping trip. We woke up to what we thought was the sound of two people having an inane argument back and forth, "Un-un, un-un, un-un." When we looked outside the tent, there were the crows, sitting on a picnic table, looking very smart.

Harvest 2

Today was indeed a good day to harvest.

My students talked for twenty minutes, and my part as moderator went more smoothly than I expected. The timing was my concern: 8 minutes to talk about a poem, 2 minutes to respond to the moderator's questions, 10 minutes to discuss one of two other major works with the moderator. Every student came within 30 seconds of these time markers and ended right at 20 or 20 1/2 minutes, and the best part is that the ideas flowed naturally. I am so pleased for my students and this good start to orals week. I admit that the most rewarding part for me was not the precision timing but to hear from each of them some original interpretation that went beyond what we said in class.

Look up

Look up every now and then.

I just looked up from a colorful article about Ed Ruscha's new exhibit. I had read several sections of the Times over breakfast and several more over lunch. I thought I was keeping an eye out for movement, because I am waiting for one cat to come back to the house after a morning outside, but to my surprise when I looked out the window, there was the female oriole and a dozen goldfinches, along with a little sparrow, all eating seeds and suet enthusiastically in close proximity on the bird feeders. While I was looking down, the landscape had filled up with color and movement.

At the same time, a hummingbird flew near the window to drink nectar from the orange justicia bush. She sat on a branch and looked in the window at me for a few seconds. I'm wearing a t shirt with flowers on it. She decided that I'm not a nectar source and went back to the justicia. Did she somehow know I had just made fresh nectar for the hummingbird feeders?

Listen for more than a few seconds at a time.

A few years ago in Costa Rica, our local guide, a vanilla farmer, asked us to tell him how many different sounds we heard. We stood and listened for almost five minutes. For most people, that's a long time to listen to ambient noise without speaking.

A flock of robins has been with us for the day. First they were in the yard to the north, then in the afternoon they moved over to the yard south of us. They talk and move around continually, on the ground and in the trees. The hummingbirds commented when I took in the feeders and brought them back out, cleaned and refilled. Every other songbird has been broadcasting at full volume since before dawn. Yesterday, late in the afternoon, as we were sitting on the back porch, a hawk stooped at the bird feeder. He went away empty clawed that time.

I recall our friend Mae said once when we were kayaking at North Key that she was storing up vistas for the coming week. Today I am storing up sights and sounds.

Harvest

The almanac says that next week is good for harvesting most days, with a few days good for planting. This alignment bodes well for the seniors' orals. Most importantly, though, after a fretful beginning to the week we ended on a high note with successful mock commentaries and discussions. They are indeed prepared.

A handful of them have avoided reading and avoided class along the way. They usually muddle through the oral when the time comes. Meanwhile, they had enough sense to keep their clever remarks to themselves this week while their better prepared classmates engaged in the final stages of readying themselves.

Cultivating the garden

By the almanac, yesterday and today were good days for destroying noxious growth. I pulled some weeds and cut some vines and tree branches that were growing all over the top of my Simpson's Stoppers. That corner of the yard is one of my favorites for window meditation and I am not to be defeated by wild grapevines and smilax.

The next two days are for destroying weeds, not the best vibe for working with background to Camus' The Stranger, but I'll approach it with the idea that we are cutting through the myths of cultural isolation that surround the novel. The weeds I would like to destroy are the notion that Meursault has no emotions, thanks to Spark Notes, ahem, and the identification of Camus as a French writer whose novel happens to be set in Algiers, a very French place with some Arabs, rather than Algiers, a very north African place with some French transplants going about their daily lives. Thus the tension.

As I look at the almanac prognostication for the week ahead, I see that the week builds up to fertile days that I hope will give us a leg up into the senior oral commentaries the first week in March. I also notice that Daytona Bike Week is not until the second week in March, so there is hope that I could go to the vintage races and see the hand-shifters working their elbows around the third curve. That would mean taking a day off work, which I never do any more for anything but my beautiful niece and nephew, Martha age 3 1/2 who just last weekend pooped on the big person's potty, and Sacha age 1 1/4 who has trumped his already physically precocious sister's deadlines for crawling and walking. Nobel prizes to come.

Flying saucers

Two weeks ago, ten saucers arrived in the post. They are Wedgwood Stonehenge Midwinter, a plain white stoneware from the 1960's that was my mother's everyday ware also. It was still in production when I set up housekeeping in the 1980's, but no longer. It came in other colors, I found out later, and I have collected a few serving pieces and party plates from the Sun pattern as well.

I ordered the saucers when I realized, with horror, that I was down to six. My mother advised me to stock twelve of everything in my everyday ware. It seemed like a lot at the time, in a house with two people, but I quickly realized she was right. We use a lot of saucers, and they get cracked and eventually break. Sometimes they get dropped. That is what happened two weeks ago, two days after the saucers arrived. I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of something breaking downstairs. I admit I didn't rush down to see what had been broken. It turned out that my husband was feeding the cats when he dropped three saucers all at once. The cats scattered and their breakfast was delayed due to the cat equivalent of post traumatic stress.

My husband dreaded that he might have broken three of the new ones, but we confirmed that the new ones were still in the dishwasher. Also, it was easy to see that the three he had broken were old, with glaze crazed from use and age, and they had a few little brown stains on the edges from a rusted dishwasher basket we replaced several years ago. I laughed because instead of buying six, to fill out my set to twelve, I had gone ahead and bought all ten that were available from the eBay seller with the best price and customer satisfaction rating. Breaking three of them brought the number of saucers in the house to thirteen-- a baker's dozen, my mother would say.

Home improvement

We just found out that our 3 bedroom, 2 story house has been appraised at having 4 bedrooms and 3 stories. We're wondering when we added the 4th bedroom and the 3rd story. We really should pay better attention.

In the woods

Yesterday I made a second trip into the woods to remove ardisia. I filled up a can, as a did a couple of weeks ago, and put it out on the curb. Sandwiched in between two nights of freezing temperatures, yesterday seemed a good choice for going where snakes and ticks might be sleeping. The poison ivy, like most things, had put out a few new leaves, thinking it was spring, so I could see where it was and wasn't. I'll know tomorrow if I was successful in avoiding its oil.

 The woods stretch across the back of the property and reach forward on either side, with the back lawn in the middle. Last time I cleared on the south side, near the house. Because there is no fence, I cleared some of our neighbors' ardisia as well before I realized where I was. Yesterday I cleared on the back northwest corner, behind the compost bin. In addition to the ardisia, I found a nandina growing next to a young oak tree. It had already dropped its berries so I saved it for another day. As my can was filling, I could see another big clump of ardisia loaded with berries beyond the old fence that marks the western boundary of our property. There is an open place in the fence and I can walk right through with my can if I wish. No one has ever said no when I asked to clear plants that were impacting my yard. One time I dug up a poison ivy vine that was growing high into the branches of our neighbors' live oak and dropping berries into my flower bed.

I plan to clear a path through the woods from one side to the other. I have only been back there a few times in the nine years we have lived here. The first time was a revelation. There was a big network of burrows on the southwest corner, probably rabbit holes. Right on top of it was a pile of fence posts and rolls of chain link fencing. Perhaps it was left over from the small dog enclosure that used to be under a tree out back. It was a miserable little space, with a wooden doghouse crumbling. I took pleasure in dismantling it and digging up the posts. I dragged the remnants out of the woods and used the best of the posts and fencing to make three sides of a big compost bin in the back northwest corner, where it is concealed by the woods.

In the south side of the woods is the place where Lily is buried with her favorite toy, a piece of rope about seven inches long, and near her is Jeoffrey's skull. After the 2004 hurricanes, our neighbors found Jeff's remains. They were delicate in their handling of the discovery. First they brought us his collar and asked if we recognized it. They had seen our notice about Jeff's disappearance on the stop sign at the corner. Then they told us they had found more, and they took us to their back yard where they found Jeff's skull. There was the flat forehead and the broad cheeks, and the unmistakeable broken canine tooth. We laughed, thinking of his fighting ways and hoping the end was quick, not lying broken listening to us walk around every house in his territory calling his name.

I have been thinking about Jeff and Lily a lot lately as I see Nick and Daisy running across the yard for sheer joy. Jeff and Lily didn't run. They both had heart conditions and walked with a steady pace instead. Lily carried her pet rope around the house in this way every day for years, except for the year it disappeared. She took it out through the cat door, around the outside of the house, and left it on the front door step. She sang the whole time. The only other time we heard her sing, aside from carrying the pet rope around, was when our friends chanted from the Koran in our living room. Lily sang right along with them. The pet rope disappeared for a year when Bob put it in his pocket one Thanksgiving. He didn't wear those pants again until the next Thanksgiving, and there was the pet rope. He had forgotten he put it there, tidying up for guests, and so the mystery was solved. Lily took up carrying it around and singing as if it had only been missing a few days and not months.

Our Irish Poet

My seniors are moving toward their oral commentary with our Irish poet, Eavan Boland. Together, we chose 18 poems within the 30 line upper limit. Only one have we ejected. I thought we had decided to eject 2 until we conferred last week and they said, no, we're keeping that one! I'm so pleased that they have had a good experience with Boland. I chose her because I like to do new things, we can't have enough Irish writers, and I was curious about her. It has been such a rewarding experience for me to prepare these poems with the seniors. I have not established contact with her (as I did with Tal Ben Shahar a few years ago) but I think of it. I'm sure she has plenty of fans across IB land.

The bathroom stalker

Be you human or feline, if you go through a doorway or open a closet in this house, the youngest cats Nick and Daisy will both be there shortly. They are not starved for entertainment. They just like to see what their people are doing.

Nick and Daisy are cats #5 and #6 for us since 1995. What a contrast with our second cat, Lily, and our third cat, Jeoffrey. Lily was a lady, only 6 pounds, but she tore open the face of a gentle greyhound next door, impaling herself on a fencepost at the end of the episode. The x-ray revealed that she had delicately curved whorls on her pelvis, the like of which the vet had never seen. Soon after that ordeal, Lily was a featherweight rock for my husband during some dark times at work.

Within a couple of weeks of bringing our third cat home from the Waffle House in Baldwin, we could see that Jeff had thrown himself into exploring our territory. He had started in quarantine on the screened porch, had his shots, had his kitten-reduction surgery, ignored the surgery, and refreshed his tomcat life in his new surroundings. I came home from school one afternoon to hear him in the branches of a sweet gum tree at the front corner of our yard. I brought out the tallest ladder we had. Fully extended, it reached 11 feet, and standing on the third rung from the top brought my hand within reach of Jeff. I could not get close enough to tuck him under one arm. I told him he would have to climb onto my shoulder. We had only known each other for two or three weeks. I explained to him what he needed to do, and then I explained again. He listened, and calculated, and hesitated. I don't know how I earned his trust, or why he did not carve canyons in my skin on his way down the tree. It took a long time for him to agree that his best option was to climb down my arm onto my shoulder. Down my arm he came, with the balance of a dancer, onto my shoulder. Then he let me cradle him and we came down the ladder together. From that moment at the bottom of the ladder we were bound.

Sheets and searches

Why does the world exist? I gave my husband Jim Holt's book for Christmas. He has been reading it steadily, with regular reports on his progress. Finally yesterday he said, this book is making me sad. When I got it for him, I thought it sounded a lot like the quantum physics book he enjoyed a few years ago, but instead it seems I gave him a metaphysical downer. I knew the author had suffered some losses before writing the book, but the reviews led me to believe that his reflections were not morose.

Meanwhile, as I was making our dinner salad, one of the cats threw up a hairball somewhere in the house. I could hear the far away muffled sounds of hacking. I looked all over the floor, upstairs and down, and did not find it. As the proverb goes, when the housekeeper is ready, a hairball appears, but this time not until later. I was filling the water bowls when I saw it on our bed. I had just made the decision to wait until tomorrow night to wash a load of clothes. I have preparations to make for tomorrow's classes. Perhaps the proverb should go, when a tightly packed evening approaches, a laundry crisis appears.

The loss of time comes in many forms, tragic and trivial.

Happy new year

Today we have broken plates, cleaned the floors (again) within an inch of their lives, and kept the kitchen busy with food for friends and colleagues. Sure those efforts will keep the kitchen god happy for another year. We spread money along the mantel and the kitchen counter. Thank you to kitchen gods, bedroom gods, bathroom gods, front door gods, and back porch gods for blessing our house. We will continue to bust our butts in return for your graces.

Nicky style

We are used to seeing El Gato Negro hanging around the yard during the holidays now, but the past two weekends some other cats have been coming through. Last weekend a fluffy black cat was staring back at me from just outside the dining room window, right up next to the house. It was almost Rose's twin, but the face was different -- beady yellow eyes and puffy cheeks. As soon as it saw me looking, it bolted.

This morning a large grey cat with white paws and muscular jaws walked through the yard. Nick was following him, and I realized this is what Nick does. He escorts visitors off the property. I saw him do it with EGN three weeks ago. We watched the grey cat walk slowly across the grass and behind a flower bed, with Nick following at a safe but purposeful distance.

Nick is not a fighter; he's a watch cat. This approach to guarding his territory is saving us hundreds of dollars in veterinary bills so far.

If it were Jeoffrey, our first male cat, he would pick a fight, disappear for a day, and then be off to the vet for a round of antibiotics. Jeff would stay outside all night from time to time to let the possums and raccoons know who's boss. We named him for the cat who kept Christopher Smart company in the asylum. Jeff had a white throat that gave him a Renaissance look. If he had an earring he could pass for a poet. Jeff was an undercover agent and a brawler. When he died during the hurricanes of 2004, every kind of animal moved into the yard, realizing he was no longer on patrol. The only foe he couldn't defeat was a Jack Russell terrier who turned from a chaser to a killer. Jeff had an enlarged heart that couldn't pump blood fast enough when he exerted himself; otherwise he could have outfought the terrier. We always suspected he would die fighting, and he did.

architecture

Waking up from a dream two nights ago, I realized the architecture in my dreams is one of the most vivid details I remember. Classrooms, schools, and houses are never the ones I see in daylight, but they appear in dream after dream. When I put them together I see that the dream homes have an area that extends far up or far back. An attic room expands to be as large or larger than the living space downstairs, full of artifacts from two and three generations ago. Or the master bedroom in the back of the house is so far back as to be desert island retreat, with low ceilings, and when reached it is an unbreachable inner sanctum with blue curtains. Those back rooms are among my favorite dream locations.

The dream that prompted this observation two nights ago was a Sunday night dream. Usually these dreams happen before the first day of school in August, or after the winter break, or after spring break, but this was just another Sunday night. I could not find my classroom, and it was raining, and I was being dropped off by my husband and friends from out of town, and I was late. (I am frequently late in my dreams, but I am rarely late when I am not dreaming.) I had no shoes, so I walked barefoot across asphalt and grass and concrete sidewalk anyway, driven by the necessity of being in my classroom when school starts. I walked down long hallways looking for my room. It was the newest part of the school, classrooms with inviting doorways and windows looking out onto the landscaped lawn. I reached what I thought was my room but another teacher's name was on the door. I assumed I was lost and confused. Only later, after I had woken up and re-entered the dream did I realize I was in the right place but my room had been given to another teacher.

If asked, I could give the dimensions of the rooms and doors, describe the windows that looked over the lawn, and show the landscapers the view from the door of my... former... classroom. I could show them how far it is from the classroom door through the hallway to the door that leads to the lawn. The angles of the intersecting hallways. I could show them where I was standing when I showed up, barefoot, with no classroom, ready to teach.

pet med dilemma

What would you do for your cat?

My veterinarian recommends flea and heartworm medication for my cats. There is one cat whose skin is so sensitive that she can only tolerate one product. We're looking at 16 years of reactions.

We give all our cats the same medication. It's mild and effective for heartworm prevention, which is more important to us than flea abatement. We're putting poison on our cats at our doctor's recommendation, so we would like it to be the least toxic possible.

Here's the dilemma. When I ask my clinic to refill the prescription, the receptionist acts like a gatekeeper. We don't recommend this product and we don't sell it. It's not as effective as ... ___ ... product. Okay, I respond, then I will order it online. Thank you.

Please hold for a few minutes while I ask, the receptionist says. She comes back and says, okay, we have some and we'll sell it to you. When I pick it up, I have to make sure I have documentation of the online supplier's price for price matching or I pay thirty-five dollars more.

Of course I would rather give my local clinic the business. They are excellent doctors and staff. Our cats get the best, most personal professional care.

There have been times when my clinic has said, no, we don't carry that any more. So I order through the online supplier. Invariably my clinic then says, when they receive the prescription request, Oh! We have that and we will do price matching to keep your business.

So what would you do? Order online and be the customer who took them at their word, when they said they don't carry that product, and be sought after by your local clinic? Or try to order it from your local clinic and be frowned at and counseled and ultimately allowed to patronize your local business because you are a valued but problem-causing customer?

My husband says ask them to flag the prescription so we don't get the rigamarole every time.

Honestly, we just want to follow our doctor's directions for protecting our cats against flea allergies and heartworm without their hair falling out.

Absolutely I would put up with this aggravation over the the pain of losing a feline friend any day. 

The almanac and my classroom garden

I wish I could schedule my lesson plans according to the garden guide in Blum's Almanac.

Planting--starting a project,
prune to encourage growth-- revising a paper,
weeding-- giving feedback,
harvesting-- presenting projects,
and so on.

Sometimes it is possible to align the school calendar with the almanac, but as with every endeavor there are hindrances.

Sybil

Sybil is a prophet, but tonight she has been remaindered. I'm more disappointed than I was when Little Nell died. Sybil has fallen victim to the Cold Mountain effect, wherein the mother dies in childbirth but the child survives as a symbol (sybil symbol) of love requited but cut short. Lots of tears but not much movement forward.

Hairballs

Our youngest, smallest cat weighs less than 8 pounds at 2 years old. She is athletic and affectionate. Even her hairballs are cute and petite as she is.

A day on the water

Kayaking today from downtown Cedar Keys to Seahorse Key. Loon, bufflehead, pied billed grebe, brown pelican, dolphin, jellyfish, common tern, black skimmer. Then a full moon on the way home.

Whitman and Blanco

Richard Blanco's inaugural poem went out of the ball park, and it made me think of Walt Whitman. I haven't heard anyone say it. I was watching PBS during the inauguration this morning. I thought, maybe David Brooks and Mark Shields will say-- wow, that poem really evoked Walt Whitman here on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's speech on the mall, and all those other anniversaries-- but they didn't. Walt Whitman somehow managed to get the whole country into a poem. He did it in "The Sleepers." He did it in "I Hear America Singing." He saw the diversity around him before diversity was a word.

I had so many things I needed to be doing, but instead I just sat with a cat in my lap and watched the ceremony unfold. The cameras showed the faces of the crowd, especially when the singers performed. The people were so proud of those high notes.

It takes a lot of patience to listen to a poem, without seeing it on the page, and I saw the patience in the President's face. He understood what Blanco was doing. He heard that poem. He wasn't just laying attention on his face. It was a good poem.