Friends in dry places

I got a call from the nursery yesterday... the silphium I had requested were in. I returned from picking up the silphium, along with some milkweed, this morning around 10:30. I set the plants in the driveway before carrying them around front to a sunny spot. When I came back to move them, five minutes later, two monarch butterflies were already laying eggs on them. I ate lunch and began planting the milkweed. I was careful to locate eggs on the leaves before handling them, so as not to knock any eggs off as I pulled them out of the pots and placed them in the planting holes. When I got to the fifth plant, checking it over thoroughly, I discovered a medium size monarch caterpillar on the back of the label. He had made the trip all the way from the nursery clinging to the yellow plastic strip stuck in the soil. I carried him over to one of the plants that was already in the ground and he climbed onto a leaf with relief. The last of the plants went in to a location that was sandier than the others. "Don't worry," I reassured it, "you've got friends in dry places."

Five days ago we adopted a two-year-old cat from the clinic. They had named her Bonnie, and we liked that name for her. She is really different than any other cat we have had in our family-- black and white patches, really short hair, skinny tail. She is outgoing and sweet and navigating the political scene with Nick and Daisy quite well. When a visitor came yesterday, she stayed right where she was and was friendly. Nick and Daisy came down more quickly than they usually do when guests arrive. And today, when more visitors came, Nick and Daisy didn't run upstairs but took their cue from Bonnie and joined in the meet-and-greet. Only five days here, and she has already become quite comfortable with them and with us.

Garden time

In 90 and 100 degree weather, I consider getting rained out of garden time to be a good day in the garden. I have plenty of things to do indoors on a wet afternoon.

I am making progress with the clearing of invasives. I don't get out there every day, but every place I clear I mulch and go back to regularly, checking for seedlings and sprouts from roots I missed. I have planted a few flowers to keep myself encouraged that I can indeed get the garden back. There is still much to be done.

Now We Are Two

Our cats Nick and Daisy continue to work out their new places or priority in our family. Daisy is small, and Nick is timid, so there is quite a bit to work out. Yesterday and today Nick went to the clinic for dental routines, a check up after his serious abcess of a few months ago, and he came through it with style. Tonight especially he was glad to be alive, not ax murdered, and glad to be back home, not abandoned or given up for adoption again. He rolled around in Bob's lap repeatedly. They were The Guys At Home. Especially good because Bob is the one who put Nick into the carrier both days. I was the one who took him to the clinic.

Island time

There is enough breeze to keep comfortable here on the veranda of the Island Hotel. On a whim, we decided A few days ago to spend the night and meet our friends here for kayaking and fishing. For about twenty four hours, we were glum and undecided because there was no vacancy here. I looked around at other places. Then late in the afternoon Thursday, someone cancelled and they called with the happy news. So here we are. Bob went out for another short paddle this morning.

Yesterday was a good day on the water. Our friends are full of jokes and they seem to have everything on their boats, even umbrellas. A half hour of light rain passed pleasantly. Then we paddled some more. We saw Dolphins fishing right in front of us, pushing up the water without breaking through it, the shadow of a fish in front. We saw turtles, and roseate spoonbills, red winged blackbirds, osprey, herons, ibis, barn swallows, frigatebirds, and rays. The guys caught trout, redfish, a bonnethead shark. The paddle back was right into the wind, and a low tide slog awaited us at the beach, but that is all just part of the package.

Fast little lives

This afternoon I took a route I rarely take to run errands. Instead of taking one of my usual circuitous and faster moving routes, I took the main artery through downtown and the university. It was mid afternoon, traffic was light, and it seemed like a good idea. Who is it that says, don't always drive the same way to work or going home... change it up a little to stimulate your brain? Bad idea this time.

Past the university, the road goes down a hill through a few blocks of houses before it reaches the next commercial strip. The cars were moving briskly, two lanes in my direction and one lane oncoming. He came from my right... a Carolina wren flying at bumper level across the road. He was fast, but there was not enough room for him to fly in front of the car coming toward me in the other lane. I heard the faintest ticking sound as the bumper hit him. In my side mirror I saw his body where it had fallen in the bike lane. His flight across the road took exactly one and half seconds. I wondered if he were a juvenile who miscalculated his timing.

I mourned him as if he were a friend. The wrens around our house fill the air with noise and motion. They dominate. Their call sounds like a heartbeat. I depend on them.

Last night I dreamed that our house had a wrap around porch. There in the dream were the four of us, me, Bob, and the two cats. I was out on the porch at dusk. I could hear a man out in the street talking on his cell phone, congratulating some reluctant person on the other end for being the lucky recipient of kitten love. This is a common tactic with people who have kittens to place.

The next thing I knew, there were three tiny gray tabby kittens on the porch. "Oh no," I said to them, "you can't come in. We already have two cats. We will find you a home." They were just the size for a cat calendar and identical triplets. As they milled around in confusion, being their cutest, I opened the door to tell Bob, "There are three kittens out here separated from their mother. We need to get them to the pet rescue." Two of the kittens dashed through the crack in the open door, just the way Daisy dashes into the closet. I'm pretty good with doors and cats, but they were fast. So I said to the third one, "I guess you'd better go in too, so we can keep you together." Bob and I agreed in the dream that we were not going to adopt three gray tabby kittens. That would be five. Too many. Two is perfect. The dream ended there, before the kittens had a chance to work their charm on Bob.

Two hard weeks

About ten days after Frida died, Bob left town for two weeks to play in an early music concert in Kentucky. Daisy and Nicky went into a decline. They had no appetite. They didn't want to play or have catnip or treats. When I left for work in the morning they looked at me as if I were never coming back. They refused to sit with me in the TV room in the evening. That was where Frida and Bob were supposed to be. One night they had a terrible fight, with Nicky chasing Daisy upstairs and downstairs. Nowhere was okay for her to be.

The next night I continued to play and have treats together with the cats, and I continued to offer them their favorite indulgent flavors for dinner. But I also had a new strategy. I watched a happy movie we had watched many times that has happy songs for the soundtrack. I realized that the movies I was watching earlier in the week were actually terribly downbeat with abusive characters suffering miserably. No wonder Daisy and Nicky were fighting and depressed, and the dark dramas were affecting my mood, too. That night, both Daisy and Nicky joined me in the TV room. A few days later Bob came home, and they were immediately themselves again.

A life

It is hard to believe, until it happens, that a life can end. From one minute to the next, the heart has stopped beating and the eyes do not see what is in front of them. We said goodbye to Frida Monday night. She died peacefully with us, her doctor, and her pet sitter around her. We laid her in a special place in the garden where we can say good morning and good night to her, as we have for the nineteen and a half years that she has lived with us. Two thirds of our marriage. Most of our life together as a family.

gifts from the past

I was tearing out vines all weekend. On the last day, I pulled up what I thought was an invasive gladiolus, but it wasnt. It was a delicate fritillary gladiolus that my mother gave me years ago, when we were at our first house. Somehow, under the green mulch that has been the jungle taking over my garden, that slender bulb thrived. I quickly watered it and promised to mulch it and keep it happy.

New arrangements

Frida has made new arrangements for her morning routine. Previously, the morning routine was...
1. sleep all night on the heating pad in the tv room
2. wake up for breakfast
3. take a break during breakfast to go to the litter box
4. eat some more breakfast

The new routine for two weeks has been
1. sleep all night on the heating pad in the tv room
2. move to the heating pad in the living room
3. pee on the other end of the couch from the heating pad before breakfast
4. move to the tv room for breakfast
5. eat breakfast

We have the couch protected with large absorbent pads and a sheet so it's just a matter of changing everything out each morning, but really... We know that a cat prefers a box of dirt so there are other factors that have made her choose the couch. We suspect shortness of breath and the presence of the other cats. Nick has a tendency to circle the room vigorously, and Daisy has to be on the scene first for investigations for any event.

This morning I placed her favorite litter box discretely at the end of the couch. Frida hilariously refused to look at it or be curious at all about what I was doing, as if to say, as she does every time I replace the pads and sheet in the morning, okay, that's good, this is working fine for me, and I'm glad we understand each other.

Sonnet

Frida is writing her meowmoirs in the form of a sonnet. So far she has a title and the first quatrain.

"I Am Enough"
by Frida

They do not need
All of those others:
The endless parade
Of "sisters" and "brothers".

Daisy misses breakfast

On weekend mornings I sleep in, just because I get up at 5am the rest of the week. My husband feeds the cats. He is awesome that way. This morning he told me Daisy didn't come down for breakfast. So in a very sleepy state, I began opening closets to look for her. I called her name. I couldn't hear a reply until I got to my office. I was about to check the closet in there but first I opened the second drawer of the big oak filing cabinet that used to belong to my Aunt Kathleen. There was Daisy. She had spent the night in there. I have to be super vigilant whenever I open a drawer, because her second favorite game after trying to get into the bedroom closet is to try to get into the filing cabinet. Once she has penetrated, she gets down behind the drawer and climbs through to another drawer. There is not much room in there, because it is full of files, but apparently there is enough for her not to be crushed when I closed the drawer last night, not realizing she was in there. My husband observed that she is at the same time the smartest and least intelligent cat we have ever known. Just now I opened the drawer, and she thought hard about it for a few seconds, and then up she went into the drawer-- trusting, I suppose, that I would save her from her silly game 99 times out of 100, which means she is good to go for another 98 rounds. 

Shanty

What do you do with an ancient kitty?
Put her in your lap and call her pretty.
What do you do with an ancient kitty,
early in the morning?

Hoo rah and up she rises
A little bit stiff in the joints she rises
Waiting for her breakfast up she rises
Early in the morning. 

Bob wrote the first verse for Frida during tv lap time Friday night. 

Daisy and the closet

Daisy may be the smartest cat we have ever known. She has figured out how to break into our bedroom closet. The closet doors slide on a track. Daisy knows how to pry the door open with her paws, so we keep a stick in the track to stop the door from moving. Now she has learned how to paw at the stick until it pops out of the track. She is only interested in gaining access to the closet at 5am. The stick rattles and the doors rattle while she is working on this project. This has been going on for quite a while, the occasional rattling at the door at 5am, but for the past two mornings she has successfully removed the stick. Now we have to come up with a new system. A round metal rod, maybe? Getting into the closet is one of the goals of Daisy's life. She and Nick wait outside while I get dressed in the morning, calling and waiting for a chance to get in around my feet when I come out.

The closet rattling is not just a by-product of her desire to get into the closet. It's a pattern with Daisy when she wants attention. If I am working in my office, she is jumping on top of things or nudging picture frames with her head, knocking things off of the bookshelves, moving piles of folders on my desk, pulling highlighters out of the mug and throwing them onto the floor. When she first came to live with us, she broke several travel alarm clocks by knocking them off the bedside tables. Her fascination with the power of gravity is boundless.

Up and down the stairs

Frida had her recheck yesterday. Her condition is unchanged since she had the procedure last weekend. That is excellent news. It is not a given that she is in congestive heart failure. There is no telling where the fluid in her chest is coming from because we are not going to put her through testing to find out. Her doctor agrees with us on this. So we are continuing to treat the symptom, the fluid build up, and keeping her comfortable. She can have any food she wants, although renal diet would help her kidneys, and the diuretic puts a strain on them. She is doing all of her cat things as best she can. Her hind quarters are a little unreliable, so instead of scratching the post this morning she rubbed it with her cheek.

Meanwhile, Daisy is more acrobatic than ever, if that is possible. Any time we walk up or down the stairs, she comes running to beat us to the top or jump on the banister on the way down. When she had been with us for a few months, I put an empty tissue box at the top of the stairs to carry down for recycling. It was one of those boxes that are shaped like a cube with an oval opening at the top. Daisy stuck her head right into the box and couldn't get it off.  I tried to help her but she was moving too fast. She backed up frantically and went through the railing, straight down to the ground floor, and landed with a thump. That slowed her down long enough for me to run down the stairs and get the tissue box off her head. She was so rattled it took a long time to calm her down. She does not have anything to do with tissue boxes any more.

Beautiful Frida

Frida is eating like a teenager and she seems to be in good spirits. Here are some pictures from about three years ago. Of course she is quickly tired by any exertion, but she is able to lie down again pretty soon after she gathers her strength by sitting for a while. Her breathing seems a great deal easier. Today she went outside the front door for a few minutes for the first time in a week.

The book

I neglected to say that the hours passed pleasantly with The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe to read while Frida slept in my lap. The mysteries to be solved in this newest installment of the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency were more focused on relationships and navigating loyalties that ran across family, business, and friendship. Even the one actual client's problem was one of relationships-- a bad marriage. Several characters had grandiose ideas about their own talents and prospects but in the end they all came to a satisfactory understanding of how they could find a niche in the working world that they would enjoy. There was more internal musing, too, from several characters, to comical effect. Missing from the ending of the novel was the poem comprised of the word "Africa" repeated. Instead the married couple who are the anchor of all the other characters simply held hands in the garden, looking at their growing plants. I have enjoyed every one of the novels in this series. I find them light and airy but with good writing and creative problem solving.

Watching the clock

This morning I sat in the tv room and finished reading The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe with Frida curled up in my lap, a fleece throw wrapped around her. I looked up at the clock now and then, watching as noon came and went, sitting longer than I usually sit still because Frida was resting comfortably. We almost lost her yesterday. We almost said goodbye to her today.

Since we returned from a weekend trip, it became clear that her condition had taken a sharp downturn. She wanted to eat but couldn't eat more than a few mouthfuls. She sat up instead of lying down, obviously in distress. Her sides worked in and out as she struggled to breathe.

On New Year's Eve, I spoke to the vet tech who was there at the clinic when Rosie died. She knew exactly what was going on and said she would relay my questions to Frida's doctor after New Year's Day. We talked, and I took Frida to the clinic for another exam. She had her six month check up just the week before and was doing fine. But now she was in congestive heart failure, her chest filling up with fluid. An x-ray showed so much fluid that the heart and lungs were invisible. Her body temperature dropped. The doctor drained off some of the fluid and Frida came through it pretty well. It was milky, not clear as expected, so something else is going on as well. She is a tough girl, her doctor says. They gave her a diuretic shot and sent us home with pills. She was better, but not much better, so Bob and I scheduled a home visit to say goodbye at noon today.

We decided that taking her up to our bed might bring more strain than comfort. I spent the night with Frida, sleeping on an old futon next to where she has her heating pad on the love seat in the tv room. She got up during the night, drank water, went to the litter box like a good girl, and went back to her heating pad. She sat up for a while to recover from the exertion and then went back to sleep. At dawn she ate a good breakfast and then asked for more.

An old girl cat who is still able to hop on the love seat, drink, eat, pick up her rubber ball, and use the litter box is not quite ready to go. We cancelled the home visit. We thought merely to make her comfortable enough to die at home, but it seems she will continue to do well enough for a few more days. She is something of a celebrity at the clinic where we took her as a stray kitten 19 years ago. Her doctor had just opened the clinic a few months before. Frida is the last cat standing.

The cranes

For the first dawn of 2015, I got up early and drove 6 miles to the pasture where a flock of sandhill cranes spends its days during the winter. I drive by the pasture every morning during my commute to school. I was running a few minutes behind so I knew I would not be there in time to see them all land. About thirty or forty were still arriving as I stood by the fence. Among those who had already landed was the whooping crane, a real standout among the sandhills. "Does he know he's different?"  another birder asked me. Surely he doesn't need a mirror to know that. Both of his legs were covered with colorful bands to show how many people are watching his progress. He poked around in the grass alongside his grey cousins. I felt it was a good way to start the new year, watching him and hoping balance can be restored between human endeavors and the natural world.