The summer has been slow so far. Slow and hot. Hot and dry. So naturally that’s when I work outside.

I have been trying to prepare a couple of areas for seeding grass, but I also have been trying to landscape a small area between the house and the driveway. It’s a steep slope, and most of it has been bare, red clay, baked by the sun pretty much all day long. We found a little Japanese maple that, according to its label, can stand full sun. That’s it standing all by itself, barely visible right between the ornamental grass and the corner of the house. The white hose is looped near it.

I built a low retaining wall to try to contain all the runoff that has been washing red silt down into the rest of the yard. We’ll see how well the maple stands up to the sun. The rows of little green specks below the retaining wall are a variety of vinca. I had to dig up the brick-like soil there and replace it with store-bought dirt.

Vinca is a nice ground cover. It grows low and has nice little flowers all through the year. I bought a good number of small plants to cover the bare dirt between our pet maple tree and the driveway. I have seen vinca growing on the north side of a house, mostly shaded, so I thought it might do well under the tree, but its growth is almost like a joke. Everywhere that is not directly beneath the maple’s limbs is growing well, but anything under the limbs is struggling. The dividing line between spreading vinca and struggling vinca is an almost perfect outline of the shadow of the tree.

I am still working on a series of retaining walls right next to the house, where the slope is steepest.

I’ll probably have two more retaining walls between the lower one and the upper one in this picture. All that red dirt has been washed down the slope from up where the wheelbarrow sits. It used to be mulch.

Once all this is finished, and I get the grass seeded, I need to start on our front sidewalk. No ever comes to our front door, so I guess there’s no rush. But it would help keep the cats’ feet cleaner.

Speaking of cats, since I last mentioned Sylvester, he has returned home again.

Cats and boxes; what can you say?

The vet said he’s OK to go outside again, so we haven’t had to worry about his problems with using a litter box, or rather his problems with not using a littler box. But the vet reported that he had yet another problem, a large seroma on the back of his neck. A seroma is a pocket of blood serum, that is, the clear part of blood. They said that it was pretty large, but it had drained. However, it left a large, open wound on the back of his neck. Now he looks like something from a horror movie — a perfectly normal cat from the front, but then he turns around that there’s a hatchet in the back of his head. Only in this case, the hatchet is gone and only the wound is left. It’s so ugly I am not going to post a photo.

A seroma is often the result of some sort of trauma. The vet had no idea how he got it, and neither do we. We didn’t see any sign of it before we took him back to the vet’s office. Sylvester doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, so aside from giving us nightmares, it apparently will not cause any problems. Unfortunately, it looks like it will leave a large area bare of hair.

Another problem on the cat front showed up in the form of a possum eating cat food on the front porch, where Leah feeds Chloe and Dusty. Possums like cat food, but apparently this one was attracted to some yellow jacket traps we put out on the porch. They are plastic bottle-like devices into which you put a mixture of water, sugar and detergent. Insects are drawn to the detergent odor, fall into the water, and drown. There, depending on how long you go between changing the bait, the drowned insects begin to stink. That stink is very attractive to possums, it seems, because this one knocked over most of them. So, we had to do something.

That something was a trap. With all the cat food and stinky, dead insects, it ignored the trap when we used our usual peanut butter bait. But cat food did the trick, at about 11:30 Tuesday night.

Some people don’t like possums, but I kind of do. I also feel kind of sorry for them. Possums don’t get no respect, but they are pretty harmless, and generally go about their business innocently.

It turns out that it is probably illegal to trap a wild animal on your property and release it somewhere that is not your property, at least unless you have permission from the land owner and possibly a permit from the state. So, of course, when the possum tripped the trap, I did not put it in the back of my truck and take it down into Texas Valley, where I did not drive a few miles into the woods and release the possum into the wild. I did not look for the small creek where I would release a possum or raccoon if I did such things, and I did not miss it somehow in the dark of the night. If I had done such a thing, I would certainly hope that it found food, shelter and water, if I had released it. But of course, I would never do something like that.

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.