Precognition

The plumber is here.

I waited three weeks for this day. He's down in the basement, working on a break in the main water line. When he finishes with that, there's a bigger job waiting for him upstairs.

He's whistling a tune.

I just realized what it is. He's whistling "If I Only Had a Brain."

This is not a good sign.

Strolling Mice

A friend of mine recently moved into a new house--a rental--and within a few days found the kitchen overrun with mice. I commented that a mouse invasion was rather unusual for a new building (it's the sort of thing I'd be more likely to see in my 1850 farmhouse if I didn't have a bunch of cats), and she said the landlord had explained that the mice came in when my friend accidentally left the side door to the garage open.

I laughed at the mental image of a family of mice strolling into the garage...or perhaps marching single-file across the threshold, determined in their mission to invade the premises. And I tried not to laugh at the fact that my friend believed the landlord.

"Did he explain how the mice got from the downstairs garage to the upstairs kitchen?" I asked. He hadn't. But implausible as it is, I still love the image of the strolling mice. It stayed with me all day.

Little Miss Sunshine

Have you seen it? I really liked the movie. It didn't make me laugh continuously, but I felt it was layered...comedy on top of a good, thoughtful story with wonderful touches throughout. I found most of the characters to be sympathetic and real. I like a movie where I care about the characters. And I thought the final scenes were terrific — and very funny.

I do have one complaint, though. They have the grandfather snorting heroin. (This is not a spoiler.) I know it's an R rated movie, but a lot of young people will see it. I think it's a mistake to trivialize heroin use like that. They could easily have had the grandfather doing something else. It didn't even have to be related to drugs. The movie doesn't get into his drug use, so there's no mention of how highly addictive heroin is. It's just something funny that Grandpa does. Not a good idea, I would say.

I admit I have a strong anti-heroin bias. The drug has invaded our rural communities and is swallowing up our children. One reason heroin has been so "successful" is that kids are unaware of its wickedly addictive properties. They think it can be used as an occasional recreational drug. And that fallacy is exactly what this movie perpetrates.

When I saw the first drug scene in Little Miss Sunshine I thought Grandpa was snorting cocaine. Cocaine certainly would have fulfilled the intention of showing Grandpa to be inappropriately cool (in the extreme). Of course, to me, pot smoking would have served the same purpose. But maybe I'm unusual.

Pogo

Pogo is Annie's black kitten. He had two orange siblings, and when we met them all three were terrified of humans. Leanne and I went next door on a regular basis to play with them, justifying it by saying we were socializing the feral kittens. This is true, of course, but we also simply found them irresistible.

They didn't socialize easy, and the process wasn't helped along when a neighborhood boy went after them with a stick. That evening, Annie moved her brood into my garage. They were all still living there when Annie became sick. The vet found several things wrong with her, and said she was in a weakened condition from nursing the kittens too long. This offended my La Leche League Leader sensibilities, but I agreed to facilitate weaning. Annie had to come into my home in order to rest and get her daily meds, and I brought her black kitten with her. I took the oranges (males? females?) to the shelter, something I'd never done before. But the staff said the kittens would probably get adopted quickly because orange kittens were popular and they were the only ones of that color. I want to believe that's what happened.

I hadn't intended to acquire two new cats, but I knew I was fated to hold on to the black kitten. What is it with me and black cats?? (More about that another time.) Annie spent a month in the guest room with her baby. During that time he overcame all his fears and demonstrated a great capacity for affection, a strong purr, and the ability to levitate in all directions. I named him Pogo.

This is Pogo's first winter. He and Annie are indoors most of the time, but he loves to go out to play in the snow if it's not too cold. Unlike his mother, he gets along well with the dogs and the other cats. He loves all the humans. At night he sleeps in Joey and Leanne's room. And sometimes he joins them for breakfast, sitting in a chair at the head of the table and looking hopeful.

Annie

I was sweeping about 10" of snow off my car last winter when I discovered--because the mound of snow at my feet began to move--that I'd been sweeping it onto a calico cat. She was unfazed by the avalanche; she she got out from under, shook herself off, and proceeded to rub around my ankles--or, more accurately, my boots.

She came around a lot after that. I learned that the woman managing the horse farm next door had acquired her, along with several others, to keep the barns free of mice. When this woman quit her job, leaving the cats behind, I decided to adopt my calico friend and get her spayed. A friend suggested that I name her Little Orphan Annie, which suited her perfectly. Those big yellow eyes! I invited her to spend the night in my house, and she readily agreed.

It was a peaceful sleepover, but in the morning I discovered that I was harboring a nursing mother. Back to the barn went Annie. Several days later Leanne and I found the kittens: two orange and one black. Thus began a period of waiting for the kittens to be old enough to be weaned so that Annie could be spayed. It dragged out quite a bit, involving medicating Annie every day for a month after it was discovered that she had elevated liver enzymes and couldn't undergo surgery until she was healthy.

Annie got spayed, moved in, and never looked back at the barn next door. She's a somewhat moody cat, affectionate one day, aloof the next. But one constant is her pleasure at finding warm, soft places to sleep. Annie loves to sleep. She also loves catnip, as you can see from this photo. And she loves her name. That is, she answers to it instantly, as well as to my all-purpose cat call: pssst!

Imagine...an animal story with a happy ending. Little Orphan Annie is an orphan no more.

Postcards From the Past

Twenty years ago I bought someone's collection of postcards. An older couple was retiring and moving away, and they held a garage sale. My son and I were big on garage sales at the time (I still am, but he's not eight years old anymore), and we did well at that one. He bought their collection of minerals, all labeled and neatly displayed, and I bought their collection of postcards.

Were I a natural-born collector like my son, I would have taken care of the postcards with an eye toward the future. But as usual, my eye was more likely to be on the past or on something cooking on the stove than profits 20 years hence. The postcards remained loosely in their box for a long time, getting moved around from room to room for various reasons. They were covered, at least, which was most fortunate in this dustiest of old houses (or at least it was that way before the remodel). But the worst part was that I used quite a few of them for correspondence. No, it was even worse than that. You see, I chose the silliest, or most boring, or least attractive postcards to mail, just out of mischievous fun.

It was fun indeed, but I had no idea that the rarest, most valuable postcards are often the silliest and least attractive. I can only hope that a good percentage of those I mailed off were the sort that collectors would find boring as well.

Anyway, I paid $5 for the collection. I began selling them individually last week, and I can see that this is going to be even more fun than mailing them. I sold six of them for a total of $33.

I wonder what the minerals are worth?

Little Bird Feet, Litle Bird Trust

Indigo Bunting (see Alphabird at right) recently wrote about the experience of hand feeding wild birds. I started to comment on it, but my comment got so long that I figured I'd better put it here instead.

One winter in the early 1970s I read a book called Hand-Taming Wild Birds at the Feeder, by Alfred G. Martin. I was living alone in the country during the week, with lots of time on my hands to devote to this project. It seemed like an impossible undertaking. But the author said if you followed his instructions (which involved patience and cold hands) you would succeed. He was right. Of course, a chickadee was the first brave bird to eat out of my hand. It wasn't long before many others, including whole flocks of evening grosbeaks, followed suit.

I would go outside and call, "Come get your seed!" in a high voice, and they would land on my arms, my shoulders, my head. I think the biggest surprise (and thrill) was when a flock of migrating redpolls landed on me. They were just passing through, but apparently decided the resident birds knew what they were doing, and as a feeding station, I was okay.

I'm so sorry I can't do this at my present home. I didn't get started when we first moved here (I was busy being pregnant and raising toddlers), and now my Raynaud's is so bad that standing outside with a bare hand is out of the question. I'll never forget the feeling of little bird feet, though. Little bird feet and little bird trust.

The War(s) of 1512

When my daughter Suzanne moved to her present home, she gave me her new address and said an easy way to remember the street number was to think of the War of 1512.

"Wait a minute," I said. "That was the War of 1812. There was no War of 1512."

"Well," she said, "I'm sure some war was going on in 1512."

Ever since then--and it's been a few years now--whenever I mail something to Zannie I remember the War of 1512. Except I've never been very clear on who was at war. So I recently ran it past Google.

It turns out that in 1512 Russia invaded the Grand Duchy of Lithuania again. And the Battle of Ravenna, fought on April 11, 1512 by forces of the Holy League and France, was a major battle of the War of the League of Cambrai in the Italian Wars. And that is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

I found it hard to envision the forces of the Holy League (did they sport halos? habits? bibles?), so the next time I addressed an envelope to my daughter Tartar-eyed Russians charged into a quiet Lithuanian village, pale-skinned villagers scattering. I've always liked Russians, but these days I've been rooting for the Lithuanians, who seem to me to be the underdogs. I think it's time I looked up the rest of the story and learned how the war ended. In the case of war, at least, endings are better than beginnings.

Text Mess(age)

My cousin was excited about a special dinner date her daughter had this week with a new guy. Being a good, non-intrusive mother, she didn't call her daughter in the middle of it. Instead, my cousin sent her a text message. It read, DON'T EAT BEANS. CK TEETH FOR PARSLEY.

Problem is, she sent it to the wrong phone number. We have no idea who got the message on his or her cell. We can only hope it was taken to heart.

You Can't Go Home Again (But You Can Drive Past)

This afternoon I listened to an NPR interview with a composer who has written the music for over 500 films. Driving my car through the woods at twilight, one of his scores swelling to a climax, I felt every inch the heroine of a romantic drama. (It doesn't take much, does it?)

Anyway, I was reminded of an experience I had in 2003:

The road was wet black with yellow leaves under my tires, the woods grey on either side. Warm air and Saint-Saen's "The Swan" poured into the car as cold raindrops hit the glass of the roof. Listening to both, I felt like a player in a movie, one where the heroine speeds off on a dark day to meet an old love. In a way, that’s what I was doing, although we can forget the heroine part. That day an afternoon appointment took me past the little house Joe and I bought in 1968, the weekend place that introduced us to Pennsylvania, living in the country, and all that came with it.

I drove down the roads we covered so many times in those early years. I saw a few familiar landmarks, and more changes than I could possibly count at 50 mph, or at any speed. It was an otherworldly trip, for in fact my head was in another world entirely, a world where we looked forward to Friday and dreaded Monday, a world where we made the decision to leave the city and live everyday among trees and birds and gardens, a world that brought us our first baby and the promise of more.

I made the turn up the hill to our first home, passing house after house where there used to be only three, and coming at last to the familiar hip-roofed structure. The roof, and parts of the garage that Joe built, were all I recognized. Our charcoal house is a pastel shade now, with chalet-type windows and doors. The garage sports a window box filled with plastic flowers. But even as my eyes took in the strange details, my lips whispered, “It’s so small…so small.”

The Queen

I enjoyed seeing the movie The Queen the other day, but I wonder what Queen Elizabeth thought of it. That is, IF she watched it. I also wonder how the filmmakers were able to get away with depicting real, live people (live being the operative word), their conversations and their emotions, in a movie.

It is unlikely that anyone will make a film about me without my consent or support (of course, with my consent and support is another matter entirely), but if they did I think I would find it WILDLY uncomfortable to watch. And even more WILDLY uncomfortable not to watch. I can see myself sitting in front of the screen--or rather I can hear myself, my vocabulary sinking another notch with every scene.

"I didn't say that, you son of a bitch!"...."Shit! That wasn't something I would ever do!"... "Oh my God, would you look at her effing hair!!"

Do you suppose something similar went on at Buckingham Palace? I think it's more likely the royal family tossed the movie reviews into the fireplace, gathered up the dogs and the cold lamb stew, piled into the Land Rover, and went stalking.

I think Annie channeled Buddy

As I told you below, Buddy had to be put to sleep earlier this month. He was a member of our family for a long time. Like most cats, Buddy had some behaviors that were his alone, although he hadn't performed some of them in his last weeks.

Another of our cats, Annie, is a calico we adopted this fall. By the time she started spending most of her time indoors, Buddy was weak and not himself. They didn't interact much if at all. He hung out by the water dish, lying down, and Annie could always be found curled up in a chair, asleep.

After Buddy died, Annie started doing some things she had never done before. They are things Buddy used to do all the time before he got sick, but Annie had no way of knowing that.

First, she took over his window seat. Okay, that makes sense. It's a nice window seat, and it was empty. Then she started walking on the stove...like Buddy. Then I found her curled up in the downstairs bathroom sink. Over the years I took many pictures of Buddy curled up in the downstairs bathroom sink. Then she began trying to share Angel's dog bed. Buddy used to drive Angel nuts doing this. Then she began hanging out in the upstairs bathroom, and trying to get on the lap of anyone who was using the bathroom...like Buddy. Finally, yesterday when I was making the dogs' dinners on the kitchen counter, Annie jumped up and started eating it. It was as though Buddy, a grey tabby, had turned into a calico!

She performed Buddy behaviors for several days, until I realized that Buddy, working through Annie, was showing me that his spirit had survived and he was still very much around. Once I came to that realization (with great appreciation), Annie went back to being her normal self.

The older I get, the less things like this surprise me.

Thanks, Buddy.

Picture Me, Picture You

I've been putting photos in albums for months. No organization, no chronological order....just taking photographs from wherever--usually photo envelopes piled in plastic bins--and filling albums with them. I bought the albums at Target--nice, big, sturdy volumes with space to write something about every picture. If if this wasn't such a gargantuan job I'd try to think up clever captions for some of the pictures. But as it is, I write "Jill on Aurora, 1991"..."Suzanne, age 4, Gillian, age 2"..."Joey, 2 weeks old"..."Nocci and Buddy" (cats)... "Angel, 1998" (dog) and so on. Once in a very great while I write "me."

This family photographer didn't get her picture taken very often. There are the birth pictures, of course, the ones of Gillian's and Joey's births. The latter actually shows my face. And when Suzanne reached the age of five she took a few shots, like the prized one of little Jill patting my HUGE bare stomach (with Joey inside). But most of the albums show three children being raised by horses, dogs, and cats. And, occasionally, their father.

If any young mothers are reading this, here's my advice: Get someone to take your picture with your children once in a while. This could be anyone--the Avon lady, the person behind the counter at the health food store, the kid who collects the carts in Wal-Mart's parking lot. The first good thing about this is that you'll have a photo of yourself being a mother. The second good thing is that these won't be portraits; they'll be unposed, unrehearsed shots of you and your kids doing whatever it is you do all the time.

Children are beautiful, and it's a temptation to photograph them that way, in all their radiant beauty. I love those pictures, I really do. I'm putting them in my new albums by the hundreds. But I also love the candid shots....the dirty shirts, the messy hair, the comical facial expressions, the images that caught them in mid-movement doing everyday kid things. I wish I had more of them.

Children disappear as they grow. The five-year-old displaces the three-year-old, and we realize with a start one day that we'll never see that particular toddler again. Then we remember the newborn. And so it goes. Thank heavens for the camera. Use it well.

Buddy's gone.

I had to have Buddy put to sleep today. The vet said he was in heart failure. That explains his labored breathing. I don't know how old Buddy was, but he was our family's close companion for 15 years or so. Like so many of our pets, Jill discovered him. He was in the barnyard, limping with a badly injured paw. He was so patient with the car, with the vet, with the treatment, with us. He was everybody's Buddy, and that's how he got the name. He was the kitchen cat, always underfoot--literally. He was the guardian of the water dish, a skilled conversationalist, and my personal feline grief counselor.

I like to think he's with his beloved Nocci, pictured with him below. And, of course, with Jill.

Cold Hands, Warm Heart (and Feet)

After weeks of Weird Winter Weather--capitalized because we began to speak of it that way--we've been plunged into a deep freeze. One day I walked the dog wearing only a long-sleeved t-shirt (and jeans); the next I bundled up in parka, woolen gloves, and scarf. More significantly, I opened up my box of disposable foot warmers.

I have Raynaud's Syndrome, which shuts down the capillaries in my fingers and toes if the temperature drops below a certain point. I'm not sure what the point is, but my fingers can turn white while peeling a carrot taken from the fridge. I've had the condition for years, but it has grown progressively worse. In the past couple of years, I lost fingernails each winter. Last winter I also developed open sores that can lead quickly to gangrene.

My feet, however, are fine--thanks to those disposable foot warmers. And thanks to Walmart's post-winter sales and good old eBay, I buy them economically and in quantity. If I could wear mittens all day every, I'd use the warmers inside them, too.

Everything's a trade-off, though. (That's my philosophy of life...one trade-off after another.) When the thermometer dips below freezing, I'm reluctant to leave the house wearing anything that doesn't keep me warm. The temperature was 10º last night. I went to a jazz club and danced....in my jeans, Land's End all-weather mocs, wool socks, and foot warmers. It was not the most graceful of dances.

Food and Tastebuds

I have a large cookbook collection that I was strongly attached to until I the day I learned to Google recipes. Today I searched on "pork chops" "sweet potatoes" recipe and got one that also included onions and apples, two ingredients I had plenty of. It had been awarded many stars by 74 reviewers. The reviews made it clear just how individual we are.

"FABULOUS dish!" gushed one reviewer. Five stars. "Dry and bland," whined the next. Two stars. Actually, most of the reviews were positive, but a handful of deeply disappointed cooks was represented as well. I was impressed with how few cooks stuck to the original instructions. They'd rave about how delicious the recipe was, and then casually mention that they had increased the brown sugar, added cinnamon, browned the pork chops, added wine, threw in some nutmeg, and cooked the entire thing on top of the stove instead of in the oven. Almost everybody decreased the amount of black pepper. I can see why--the recipe called for two teaspoons!

This is the kind of thing you can't get from a cookbook. If I go through my old cookbooks and look up the recipes I've been making for years, nine times out of ten I can tell you that I've made adjustments to it. It's nice to read how others tweaked a recipe, and whether or not their tweaks yielded a good dish.

I made the pork chop recipe tonight, but I didn't follow the instructions either. Since I usually avoid sugar, I left the brown sugar out entirely. I like cinnamon, but I wanted this dish to be more savory than sweet so I wasn't tempted to put it in. Instead, I followed the suggestion of one reviewer and added garlic. I also added Tony Chachere's creole seasoning at the suggestion of another. And, after reading of the experiences of many of the reviewers, I browned the pork chops first and cooked the dish on top of the stove.

I liked it. Four stars.

Jill's Birthday

My 40 Words a Day blog is winding down...only 26 more entries to go! I can see it's time to pay some attention to Sweet Rocket. I'll need something to do when Forty Thieves is finished. :-)

It's the day after Christmas...Jill's birthday. She loved having her birthday on December 26. She said everyone else was finished with their gifts, and then she got more! We didn't have a lot of birthday parties for her, as it was hard to pry people out of their houses and often the weather wasn't the best. But I always summoned the energy to bake a birthday cake, and we all felt festive on her special day.

I went into labor Christmas night, 1975. I had fallen into bed, completely exhausted, at 10:00 p.m. after cooking a standing rib roast and Yorkshire pudding...and then eating it. And of course cleaning everything up. My baby was due January 7, so I figured it was okay to knock myself out as I'd have two weeks with nothing to do but sit and rock and wait. Wrong! My water broke at midnight.

My knees knocked. A blizzard raged outside. The hospital was an hour away. This was in the days before SUVs and 4x4's. My husband drove a big, rear-wheel-drive Cadillac. As always, I had the utmost confidence in his ability, and, as always, he came through for me. We made it to the hospital just fine, and Gillian Campbell Jaffer was born at 8:27 a.m. the day after Christmas. (Her sister, Suzanne, had been born at 8:27 p.m. on Labor Day.)

The doctor missed the delivery, which was okay. What was not so great was that he told me my labor had hours to go. This was not welcome news! He got a little short with me about it, and stalked off to perform surgery. Jill was born minutes later. Joe sat on the bed and I pushed her out into his hands. After her arms were free I caught her hands in mine and smiled at my crying baby, still half inside me. The nurse said, "Why don't you lift her out yourself?" She said I should just hold her under her arms and lift her out. So I did.

When the doctor came back, I was sitting up taking pictures of Joe and our new daughter. The doctor said, "I waited a long time for this generation of women." Joe said later that he thought this remark was said in apology for his curtness with me earlier. Perhaps. He was a good man, and offered family-centered, homelike birth experiences at a time when most other physicians were still practicing the knock-'em-out-and-drag-'em-out method of childbirth.

My baby. She grew up to have so much creativity and sensitivity, so much grace, so much humor. Her birth announcement was prophetic. I wrote, "The world's wolves, cats, butterflies, dogs, whales, rabbits, and squirrels announce the arrival of a new friend."

Happy Birthday in heaven, Jilly.

Spaiku!!

I've invented a new poetry form. It's called the Spaiku.

I should be writing
filling the blank screen with words
but instead I'm filling my TV screen with Desperate Housewives


SPAIKU: A poetic form in which the first line consists of five syllables, the second line seven, and the third line does whatever the hell it wants.From the Rumanian word spaik, which means (roughly translated) Hit me with another drink.

Here's my stepdaughter Nancy's:

You don't watch TV
the way the rest of us do
but instead you invent new poetry forms. Go Susie!

Okay, leave me a spaiku...

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Come back at night. I've always liked the ideal climate proposed in Camelot, where it rains only between midnight and 8:00 a.m. Actually, I'd change it to 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. because this time of year I like to be out in the garden early in the morning.

The rain is coming down hard. It started yesterday morning, but it feels as though it's been pouring for days. I went to an engagement party yesterday. The hostess had a long tent set up outside, with tables and chairs underneath. Before I got there, the heavy rain collapsed the tent. So it was in indoor party—crowded, but nice. The porch was filled with open umbrellas in all colors.

The engaged couple are singers, and they sang "People Will Say We're in Love," from Oklahoma. For some reason that song is often in my head. I'll be vacuuming or whatever, and I'll just come out with it. I don't know why. Usually there's an obvious reason—almost always connected to the lyrics—why a song pops into my head. Even when it's not obvious, the process of figuring it out can be quite revealing and interesting. But this song? It makes no sense to me. Has someone stolen my hat and my glove? No. Is someone sighing and gazing at me? No. Am I gazing back? No. Are my eyes glowing? Hardly. Maybe the answer is something simple. Like maybe it's just in my key.

Slowing down, but not stagnating

New York City is under a "stagnation advisory" until 11:00 p.m. I don't know what that means, but it sounds most unpleasant. It has something to do with the weather. It's hot here in the country—90º as I write this—but as far as I can tell nothing is stagnating, not even me.

I got up earlier than I wanted to this morning in order to plant a rose (Sharifa Asma) before the sun got too high. Sharifa and the others I planted this week are covered with white laundry baskets from the dollar store to shade them from the hot sun. So far, at least, I haven't resorted to wearing one on my head.

Yesterday I planted two roses (Carefree Wonder and Distant Drums) in the early morning and then drove to town to get my hair cut. I think the style looks like Mariska Hargitay's, but maybe I'm overly optimistic. That's okay...overly optimistic is a nice change from I HATE MY HAIR, the most common reaction after visiting a salon. The only thing is, my bangs have disappeared. I don't know how she accomplished this; I know she didn't cut them off. But they don't seem to be there anymore. The bangs were the only part I liked about my last hair style. This is a little disconcerting.

Anyway, I came home, accomplished a modest amount in my cool (as in lower temperature) house, and around 6:00 p.m. went back outside to plant another rose (Scarlet Meidiland). By then the mosquitos had been alerted to my presence (salivating mosquitos are a sight to behold!), so one rose was my quota.

Henry Nevard, a lusciously-scented red rose, is supposed to arrive next week, and with it possibly Blanc Double de Coubert, a white rugosa I've admired ever since I read my first antique rose catalog, perhaps 35 years ago. Numbers like that are ever more meaningful to me as I drag myself around in this heat, feeling my age more than I ever have. I guess that figures, as I've never been this old before.

Two more Scarlet Meidilands are presently soaking in a bucket, awaiting their new homes in the ground. If all goes as planned, the three of them will grow beautifully and eventually cascade a bit over the stone wall of the terrace. Things rarely go as planned, but as I said before, optimism is good.