Monthly Archives: May 2019

The mouth that roared

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Mollie doesn’t roar. She barely makes a sound. Leah was taking some photos of Mollie lying in the sun in a chair in our “office” when Mollie yawned wide.

Mollie is doing OK, but Sylvester is not. We brought him back from the vet’s office last week with instructions to squirt some liquid medicine into his mouth and not let him outside for at least two weeks. Nothing easier than squirting medicine into a cat’s mouth, right? The first few times I tried I got most of it on Sylvester’s chest and Leah’s hands. I eventually got the hang of it.

Unfortunately, Sylvester did not get the hang of peeing in a litter box. That was bad enough, but he was having some difficulties associated with the final portion of his digestive tract. Look back a little in the preceding sentence to find out where that was.

Anyway, the results of his difficulties could be seen on our floors. It was simply not going to work, so on Tuesday we took him back to the vet’s and assigned that task for her and her assistants to deal with it until, we hope, everything is back to normal.

Assuming that Sylvester actually recovers all the associated capabilities he needs to be an inside cat, he will be well enough to assume his role as an outside cat, coming inside only to eat and maybe take a short nap. And then we will not have to follow him with a mop.

A startle on the road

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Friday morning I took the dogs for their regular walk down Fouche Gap Road. As usual, I was woolgathering while the dogs sniffed out anything new along the road. We were about halfway down the mountain, just passing a low tree that was completely covered by a mound of kudzu and muscadine vines. Just as I drew up even with it, there was a loud rustling and crashing from it.

The mind works quickly in situations like that. I fully expected a large animal to come out right at me. I thought, what will it be? I went through the possibilities. There are some bears around; I have never seen or heard of one in our area, but the Atlanta news sometimes shows videos of bears in suburban neighborhoods. I have seen coyotes here, but they run away when they see a human. In south Georgia they have wild boars that can do a lot of damage to a person, but I have never heard of one in north Georgia.

So, I wondered, what will it be? Will it attack me? Will the dogs bark? Will they throw themselves at the wild animal that is almost certainly going to be huge and, from the sound of its thrashing, angry?

And then, in the last part of that instant when all those thoughts ran through my mind, a turkey burst out of the vines and flew away.

It happened so fast I really didn’t have a chance to be scared. Startled, definitely. A profane expression might have escaped my mouth at that point.

The dogs must have known it wasn’t going to be dangerous because all they did during the moments leading up to the turkey explosion was stare in the direction of the noise with somewhat greater than mild interest.

Turkeys are noisy flyers. We saw another one on our way back up the mountain. I heard its wings hit limbs as it flew through the tree tops. I wish they would make a little more noise on the ground instead of hiding until the last moment.

Sylvester Returns

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Our cat Sylvester disappeared sometime around April 2, about six weeks ago. On Saturday afternoon we got a text from a neighbor with a photo asking if the cat in the photo was ours. It was blurry and hard to tell, so we rushed up to her house. It was Sylvester.

He was in her garage. He was drinking water in the photo our neighbor sent us, and he was drinking water when we got there. He was a thirsty cat.

Zeke and Sam checked him out when we brought him home.

He walked around a little, drank more water, and ate a little food. He was skinny, smelly and thirsty

Our neighbor was one of the first people we called about Sylvester when he disappeared, so she had been checking around her house. On Saturday she said her new dog led her to the garage with her barking. Apparently the barks were directed at Sylvester.

Our neighbor doesn’t park in the garage, but she had been going in and out regularly and had not seen the cat. It’s hard to believe he spent six weeks undiscovered in her garage, with her coming and going, without food and water.

He has a urinary tract problem that requires special food, all of which we recently returned to the vet because we expected never to see him again. In addition to being extremely skinny and bony, he has a generally poor physical appearance. We have been debating whether to take him to an emergency vet clinic on Sunday or wait till Monday so his regular vet can see him. We’ll have to see how he does overnight before we decide.

We have been speculating about what happened to him, but it’s a pointless exercise. Until we get a universal cat language translator I don’t think we’ll ever know the story.

Leaving 68

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Today, May 18, is my 69th birthday. As of now, I start my 70th year here on Earth. It’s strange to get that old; I’m older than more than 88 percent of the people in the country. I don’t feel particularly old in my head, but my body begs to differ. I imagine most people who see me would think that I am at least 69 years old. Maybe even older.

When I think about my past, it seems like it happened to a different person in a different world, like a book I read once. There is almost nothing physical left from my past. Not the house where I grew up. Not my grandparents’ house where we had big family gatherings. Not one of my own family, and none of my father’s family.

Someone has cut down the trees, flattened the hills, and channelized the creeks.

I don’t have much time left to achieve any dreams left unrealized. Many of them are beyond my reach.

I might as well have imagined it all.

I find myself in a new world, and not a brave one. It’s at times like these that I have less regret for not having had children. I would feel guilty to leave this world to them. I worry enough about my nephews. What will things be like for them when they reach my age? Better? I would like to believe it, but I’m finding that harder and harder.

I have enough to do here and now to occupy my mind, but sometimes I envy the dogs; they don’t have worry about finding something to occupy their minds. A peanut-butter-filled rubber bong takes care of that.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I was a runner, and so was my brother. Henry was faster than me for most, if not all of his life. In age at least, I’m catching up to him. He died at 70 in April of last year. If I make it through one year and eight months, I’ll pass him.

Yard work

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I am once again doing some yard work around the house. We have done a lot in the almost three years we have been here, but when you start from probably a half an acre of bare dirt, it takes a while to get everything the way you want it, unless you have won the lottery and can hire a landscaping firm. We haven’t, so we can’t.

I put some plywood sides on my 5×10 trailer so I could load it up with topsoil. It comfortably held about three and a little more scoops, each of which is supposed to be around a cubic yard. The landscape company loads with a tractor. I unload with a shovel. Here you can see the pile of topsoil to the right of the trailer.

You can also see a little pignut hickory tree which I will remove and replace with a Japanese maple that is supposed to be suitable for full sunlight. The bare area will be planted with zoysia, like the front yard, which is to the left of where I’m parked. There is a pine stump to the right of the little hickory. It’s from a dead pine I cut last year. I dug around it and cut some of the bigger roots with my axe, then I chained the stump to my truck and jerked it out of the ground. I have to do the same to two, or possibly three, other pine stumps in this area.

I’m going to spread some of the topsoil over the bare dirt here and in a similar-sized section on the other side of the driveway. Then I’ll till it in and plant zoysia, as I did on the two sections of our front yard.

I also plan to use some of the topsoil to plant another maple next to the house. This is looking across the site of the second maple planting towards my truck and trailer. The gray blocks will be a low retaining wall to level the area where the tree will go.

Some of our bulbs have flowered and some are just beginning to flower. The lillies towards the back of the flower bed have impressive orange blooms. The yellow plants are abelia (I think) and the red plants are barberry (I think). The Japanese maples are skinny stalks that we hope spread their limbs and grow. Japanese maples are slow growers, so we know it’s going to take a while.

I also plan to spread some topsoil around the lower section of our front yard, where I worked a good part of last summer trying to prepare for grass planting. That did not go well, and we ended up with only about 50 percent coverage of zoysia, with a lot of undesirable grass spread through it. When I mow this area, the patchy grass and sections of eroded, bare dirt make for a rough and bumpy ride across a fairly steep slope. Every time the mower bumps, it wants to slip downhill, so I have to angle the mower uphill to maintain a straight line.

I unloaded the trailer Tuesday afternoon. Then I had to run the mower over the lower front part of our yard to try to discourage the weedy volunteer grass so the zoysia I planted can get more established. Then I had to run the mower down both sides of Lavender Trail in front of our house. Our land looks uninhabited from the road; you can just catch a glimpse of the house if you look carefully. If I don’t mow the grass along the road it looks pretty bad. Mowing makes it look more like someone lives here.

Everything was good as I worked. It was cool for this time of year, not even 70F, and the humidity was unusually low for May in Georgia. The mower is self propelled, but I still have to push it. But the weather was so nice I didn’t end up soaked in sweat. I put the mower away, walked over to the steps into the house and sat down to take off my boots. That’s when the stabbing pains in my knees started. That’s the new normal for me and my knees. Once I’m sitting down, my knees don’t hurt. If I sit more than about 20 minutes and then stand, my knees hurt. If I walk for 20 minutes, or two hours as I did Tuesday, my knees hurt when I sit down. Some day I’m going to have to do something about that.