Author Archives: Mark P

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.

The perils of wildlife

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Wildlife doesn’t hold many perils for humans, at least not in this part of the country. There are venomous snakes, so you need to watch your step if you’re traipsing through the woods in warm weather. There are coyotes, which pose a danger for small animals like cats, but not much of a danger for adult humans. There have been coyote attacks on humans, some resulting in deaths, but most attacks have happened in the Southwest. I have heard of very few in Georgia, and all resulted in the death of the coyote. I have certainly never worried about coyotes attacking me, and there are plenty around here. Wasps and yellowjackets might be considered wildlife, and they pose a risk for painful stings, or worse if you happen to be allergic. But for the most part, here on the mountain and most of the rest of the country, the perils of wildlife involve the dangers that humans pose to the wildlife.

We and our cats have taken a toll here lately. I was trying to extend some civilization into our wild property by clearing a small area next to the driveway to plant grass. It involved a lot of digging and scraping to get rid of the bunch grass, maple seedlings and pine stumps. At one point I scraped what I thought was a clump of dead grass with my shovel and uncovered a rabbit nest with two or three baby rabbits. I had actually scraped one completely out of the nest, so I put it back and tried to replace the fur and grass the mama had placed around the babies.

If you think rabbits are cute, then a baby rabbit is that times a hundred. These were probably only a few days old. Of course I know that the life of a wild rabbit in the wild is short, maybe a year or two. They seem to be ready-made as dinner for foxes and coyotes.

And cats, as it turns out. The next day Mollie came back inside with a baby rabbit in her jaws. It seemed unharmed, so I put it back and recovered the nest. The next day I caught Chloe standing a over a baby rabbit a few feet away from the nest. I chased her away and tried to replace the baby and its nesting material. But I knew it was going to be futile.The cats knew where the nest was, and, if the Intertubes are correct, rabbits are one of the few mammals that can’t or don’t move their babies. In fact, they pretty much leave them alone, only coming back to the nest a couple of times a day to feed them. So, the next day, the nest was empty.

Some people would say that the cats are only following their nature. They are hunters of small animals, and that instinct remains strong, even for well-fed cats.

But I still don’t like it. That’s my nature.

On Friday I saw Chloe walking around with another small animal in her mouth. I chased her away, and she dropped it. It was a chipmunk, or possibly a ground squirrel. It was not moving, but when I got closer, it scampered away into a clump of liriope. It might have been OK, or it might have been mortally wounded; I don’t know. Leah went down later to investigate and found nothing.

Birds have also been having a hard time around here. Some kind of smallish bird was trying to build a nest on the floodlights we installed on the eave between the garage doors. At first I thought it would be OK, if a little messy, but then we realized that when the babies left the nest, there would be cats sitting below with their mouths open and watering. So I destroyed the nest and have been shooing the bird away over the last few days. It seems to have given up.

However, some other (or possibly the same) bird has been getting into the garage. I don’t think it has built a nest so far. It seems a little smarter than the hummingbirds that get trapped, because it has figured out how to fly out an open garage door. This has happened three times. Once, instead of flying out the garage door, it flew into the house through the open door into the kitchen. Fortunately it headed straight to the front door and hung on to the bottom of the storm door. It stayed there as I opened the door, and then it flew away.

I know, Nature, red in tooth and claw. But not my tooth, and not my claw. And not our cats’ teeth and claws if I can help it. I usually can’t.

 

 

Blue and green and a cat

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We had some dreary and rainy days last week, and then a day with clear, blue skies and new, brilliant green leaves. Spring leaves. I took this picture up into the trees last week on my regular dog walk.

Then we had some more rainy weather, with wind this time. Some places south of here had severe storms and even tornadoes, but not here. And then Sunday dawned clear and cool. The leaves looked pretty much the same as the picture I took last week, so I’ll let that suffice.

But what about the cat? It’s Mollie, as usual.

You can see that her mouth is open. Imagine a cat meowing, and that will not be her. She can barely squeak out a pitiful-sounding mew, and as often as not, nothing comes out.

I’m embarrassed every time I take a picture inside the house where you can see the trim that isn’t completed. I am, though, working this very day on finishing the living room baseboards, so maybe the next time Mollie poses in her toy/catnip box I can take a photo without being embarrassed.