Russian blue cat on a black chair. This is a color photograph, not black-and-white; and it is not a negative.
Gwenny has thick, plush fur of a uniform dark gray color with a shiny silver undercoat that under a direct light highlights her outline (and makes petting her feel like sinking your fingers into butter). Gwenny weighs eight pounds. She is eighteen years old and can still teleport like a kitten when the mood strikes her. Which is not now.
Relaxed, yet alert, Amber wonders why I keep flashing this bright light in his face.
Amber the Maine coon cat got a new lion cut for the summer yesterday. He looks so serious and regal, all 23 pounds of him.
Gwenny the 8-pound Russian Blue, who has lived with Amber for fourteen years, no longer recognizes him. She hisses when he comes into the same room with her. And if he’s in a room first, she won’t go in.
The Buddha’s kingdom is within. And the chipmunk’s…?
Take it from me: The chipmunk and its kin are lords and masters of the entire garden.
Amber is a peaches-and-cream Maine coon cat. Like all cats, he takes himself seriously. And characteristically of male Maine coons, he is completely lovable and goofy–in short, hard to take seriously. Here he rests in a sink half his size–which, in case you’re wondering, is 23 pounds (the cat, not the sink)–wondering what I’m doing with that little flashing box.
I live in an urban world. But through an accident of extraordinary good luck our house borders on three hundred acres of conservation land in the middle of the city. And we have coyotes. It is a miracle.
The coyotes are out tonight. There must be at least four of them and maybe six or more. They sound the way the Northern Lights look in the sky–something so large and incongruous your heart stops and you just have to open the windows and pay attention.
God speaks in many tongues.
The weekend of November 19-21 was a bittersweet one for us. It was our last weekend on the island. This is always a kind of sad affair, the last several hours of which involve laundering and putting away the sheets and towels, draping the sofas and chairs with old slip covers and drop cloths so that they will not fade, and packing all our clothing, food, and even many of the staples that we don’t want to leave over the winter in the cold, cold house.
But the island gave us many gifts this weekend, as it often does; and so over the next few weeks I will share with you our unexpected visitors, two sunsets, and a moonrise.
On Friday we were visited by two does and their fawns. If they had come any closer to the house, they would have been sitting on our deck chairs, and we would have had to offer them some gin-and-tonics with their grass. These pictures are taken through the (dirty) windows, so the quality is not the best. But the subjects were so photogenic it hardly mattered.
I think these are the two fawns. They arrived separately and seemed really happy to see one another. Friends.
Here’s a cuter shot.
And this picture, with the porch column in the foreground, may give you an idea of how close they came to the house.
What with all the travel, we fell behind in brushing our mostly-Maine-coon cat Amber this spring. The knots wouldn’t come out any more with a brush, and Amber won’t sit still for a scissors. So the only thing left to do was to take him for professional grooming. And so, day before yesterday, poor unhappy Amber was transported to our nearby local “Pet Resort and Spa” for a lion cut.
Well, I did tell them to use the unscented shampoo. Really.
But whether it’s his new ‘do or his fresh, clean smell, Gwenny doesn’t recognize Amber any more. Gwenny is a Russian Blue less than half Amber’s size. “Who let this alien creature into the house?” she growls. “Get him out! Go away! Back to wherever he came from! This is *my* territory! Mine!”
She won’t let him in the same room with her. When the yowling gets too intolerable, I have to separate them.
Amber seems to find this confusing. He’s learned over the last thirteen years not to be afraid of Gwenny, and it’s probably been almost a decade since she acted this hostile. “Who, me?” he wonders. “Wazzup with this?”
As I sit at the kitchen table going over the program for Worldcon 67 (Anticipation 2009), the sky darkens. And then really darkens. Rain pours so heavily it drowns out the sound of the waterfall. Flowers are subjugated into down-facing humiliation, and I marvel that they have evolved to stand such a beating.
Thunder roars.
Amber, who has been napping at the edge of the rug, looks up in alarm. As the thunder strikes again, he scrambles, terrified, to his feet.
Amber, the world's silliest, most doglike cat
I try to soothe him. “It’s okay, Kitty. It’s all right.”
But Amber is not to be soothed. He knows that whatever this is, is horrible. He slinks from the room, keeping as low to the floor as he can. Later, I find him hiding on a chair pushed far under the dining room table. He won’t let me touch him.
It’s spring, and the hosta have come up all over the garden. This is good news, not only because it means the weather is warmer and the garden is prettier, but also and more to the point: The deer did not manage to kill off all my hosta when they clipped them down to bare stalks last fall.
Even the expensive designer blue, cream, gold, dark green, and chartreuse hostas in mix-and-match stripes and leaf-margins are back. Given the amount of shade here, the leaf-patterns of these hostas are an important part of the garden: The shy and retiring Allan P. McConnell, Aristocrat, flamboyant little Feather Boa, Grand Tiara, Great Expectations, June, Touch of Class, and the hard-to-find Venus, with unprepossessing green leaves and marvelously large and fragrant flowers in August. There are also lovely swathes of narrow-leafed and wide-leafed green hostas and twisty green-and-white-leafed hostas that are legacy plants from the previous owner and that we have propagated across the garden over the years.
So now, my job, as I see it, is to make sure that the deer don’t get these hosta again.
Last weekend we went to Lowe’s, and I bought two different types of deer repellents. I installed the one and sprayed on the other. Yesterday, I did some research on the Internet to see what else I might do. I found that there are many products on the market, including those that smell bad to deer, those that taste bad to deer (don’t use these on your vegetable gardens, though), and both. My favorite of these is a substance called “Milorganite”, which is made from Milwaukee sewage. Really! And–it’s organic!
There are also many recipes for deer repellent that can be made right at home from readily available (or, well, obtainable) ingredients. These range from eggs to liquid detergent to hot peppers to garlic to hair clippings to urine (don’t ask).
But of all the recipes posted by helpful people on various Web sites, my absolute favorite is from Hanxter at www.deer-departed.com. Please click through and read it! Even if you don’t have a deer problem! This may not be the most effective solution to the deer problem, but hey — turnabout is fair play.
I wonder if they have a hunting season in Newton.
