Poetry Thursday . . . a little late

Because of the holiday, I'm all goofed up this week. On the Fourth we had a day of sloth, socializing, real concerts starring the kids, and barbecue invitations. Tuesday we had new garage doors, lifters, remotes and keypads installed, and it all went terribly awry. Today I'm still reeling from the garage-door fiasco (they had to come back this morning to fix all the bollixed up business, including their thievery of our ladder), and because yesterday was so relaxing, today feels like Monday and I keep consulting the calendar only to review activities for the wrong day. Frankly, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, except for getting the garage-door installers to redo and make it all properly functional without harassing them.

Oh, yeah! It's Thursday. That means Poetry Thursday. And because I was derelict in my duty last week, I feel the guilty obligation to post something, even though it isn't any good.

My previous post about raccoons confirmed that I'm fairly blackhearted when it comes to nuisance wildlife. I think it's cute and love to watch it--from a distance. But I'm a beast, too, and I won't put up with the invasion of my territory if it results in damage.

I wrote this before the raccoon post, when I had not yet been enlightened as to which animal was creeping about at night. It was clear to me that it wasn't the squirrels, because they wouldn't take the bait by day--but I got a notion--imagine that squirrels were stealthily creeping about at night and hoarding things that they wouldn't touch by day?

The Porch

One by one the night squirrels come
silent and haunting
tree to tree
roof to roof
like acrobats in “Crouching Tiger”
furred and tailed.

Wrought-iron pillar to suet cage
blue spruce to hopper feeder
spilling the miniature birdbath

hungry
marauding
devouring stale rice crackers I tossed to taunt
whoever would take the bait.

Next time I’ll leave
wasabi peas.

Destruction

There's a great poem by Joanne Kyger ("Destruction" in the section entitled "Beasts" in Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor) that describes how a bear ransacks a cabin. This morning I looked out the kitchen window to discover this--look under the bench:

At the base of the wrought-iron post is a pot full of lily bulbs. The plants are flourishing and just on the verge of blooming into my favorite big pink Asiatic lilies. I should say they were flourishing, until the middle of last night sometime. There used to be three plants, but as you can see from the photo somebody marauded one of the plants. Ripped it right out of the pot. Took the buds off. Shredded the stalk in half. Tore the precious leaves right off that sucker.

Who? Who? Who would do such a thing? Rampant, egregious destruction. A blatant, violent attack upon an innocent and potentially beautiful flower. Obviously it wasn't deer; they can only nibble. Not squirrels; the plant was to big for them. Not the many birds, however aggressive they may be, and many of them are.

Tyke took one look and said, "Raccoons."

He's pretty smart, that tyke. Of course he is right. I've never seen any raccoons around here, but I know they're on our property and the neighbors'. Tyke said that once when he was up high in his favorite tree he saw some raccoons going into a den by the remains of an old stone tree ring on our property. Occasionally they get into garbage cans and tear up garbage on the street.

So, news for the raccoons: I am officially stalking you. What would you like to taste next? A little arsenic? That can be arranged. When I catch you, I'll hang you upside down from the wrought iron post and pelt you with a slingshot full of large gravel. I don't care if you DO wash your grubby little hands before you eat. I'll grab them and tear you limb from limb.

I guess it's obvious that PETA gets no vote from me. I have even worse things to say about squirrels.

From now on, No Trespassing! I'm playing hard ball.

Poetry Thursday: A Dark Memory & Revenge

I'm not just lazy this week, but also really busy. Haiku and a cinquain will have to suffice.

Dark Memory

Chewed insulation.
Electrocuted squirrel.
All the lights went out.


Revenge

Onion
forces mourning:
its flesh white as a ghost,
spirits sharp as the butcher knife
carve tears.

Anybody Have a Calendar?

A couple of nights ago I rummaged around in the veg bin to pull out an onion to chop for a dish I was making. I had just bought the onion a couple of days prior. To my surprise, this is how it looked:

Yo! Mr. [or Ms.?] Onion! Dude!! It's January! It's not spring!

Apparently all the tubers have been talking to each other in code and launching a conspiracy. The daffodils by the front porch and the mail box are trying to come up. Martha Stewart, the girl I love to hate, says to un-confuse the bulbs by burying them in more and more mulch. With all due respect, this seems to me to be just a facile coverup. The little green shoots are still under there, they just have farther to go to see sun. [I'd better not lose my iris, or I'll be hopping mad!]

The squirrels are all going crazy digging around for the nuts they only just buried. And, instead of going somewhere else for winter, the birds seem to have proliferated and are blowing the bird-feeder budget. Even the big, bully blue jays are loitering for a handout, especially on or near the hopper feeder, which is supposed to close when big birds land on it (but jays are smart and have figured out how to defeat this safety feature). This is perfectly fine with the squirrels, who hang around beneath the feeders waiting for discards and spills.

Kid #1 is about to finish an extra-credit project for science. His subject? Global warming. We're about to watch the Al Gore movie. I've been trying to put it off because I know it will depress me profoundly, but there's no point in leaving my head stuck in the sand. Blatant signs are all over the place anyway.

Confessions of a Mad Menagerie Owner

It's not my fault. I didn't do it--at least most of it--except for one or two creatures among the menagerie. Other people did it. I became their unwitting victim. For some reason, I am viewed as a "critter magnet." It's true that I really love certain types of animals, especially reptiles and amphibians, fish and odd beings like armadillos. Yesterday's influx of frog gifts just finally made me give up. Why fight it? I'm like an inanimate-object equivalent of a crazy cat lady. If I weren't so terribly allergic, I probably would BE a crazy cat lady. As it is, my "pets" are surrogates and require no vet bills.

I'm not sure how it all started, but one by one people pegged me as someone who "needed" this or that little animal thing they saw. They spied it while they were out somewhere and immediately thought of me and decided to indulge me in it without my express consent. I hadn't really examined this issue until one day I was looking around the kitchen thinking, "If we were to renovate this kitchen, what would be the aspects of it I'd want to keep, and what do I hate that we will change?" It was then that I truly noticed the plethora of stupid little animals everywhere in the kitchen. They sit on window sills. They hang from window frames. One has been living in the fruit bowl since Halloween of 2002. They lurk on walls and sit atop the canisters. It's embarrassing, really. I've just been so preoccupied that I hadn't thought about the alarming quantity of kitsch I've collected. I just dust them off regularly and take them for granted. They're members of the family.

As an attempt at therapy, and perhaps to keep for posterity in case I ditch them all if we redo the kitchen, I've made portraits and have decided to "out" my strange collection.

Cam the Ram and e-Claire the Cow

I got these one per year on two annual trips to the museum shop of historic Deerfield, Vermont. They're old-fashioned cast iron and are excellent for holding open cookbooks. I got Cam because in the 1400s to 1700s my ancestors, the Camfields of Northamptonshire, England, became serious experts in sheep husbandry. Matthew Camfield was the first to move to New England--right here where I now live, in fact--and became a greatly celebrated wealthy man for selling his services as a sheep consultant to the settlers who had no idea how to keep their animals alive in this new environment. Matthew moved his way right up to the top of society and married Connecticut's first colonial governor's daughter, Sarah Treat.

E-Claire appears desperate to be milked and was discovered and named by Tyke, who is very fond of anything pastry, sweet, or creamy. He came up with the name instantly and no one could think of any improvements--it was just the right name for her.

Scabbers
About five or six years ago we as a family attended a Halloween costume party. This was before Harry Potter was fabulously successful, but we were among early adopters and by 1999 we were wild over the first book. G went as Harry (this was before the movies and we had our own idea from our imaginations how he should look). Honey went as Hagrid and was quite the riot. We recreated Hagrid in great detail and I decided that he had to have a mouse for his pocket (this is mentioned in the book, along with the pink umbrella which actually disguises his forbidden wand). I made the "mouse" too big, however, and it came out more like Ron's stupid magical rat, Scabbers. After his debut at the party, Scabbers was relagated to the fruit bowl, where he guards the bananas on a daily basis.

Assorted Little Guys

The wonderful beaded Huichol turtle was brought to me by a friend/neighbor who has a time share in Puerto Vallarta. He is hand-carved of wood with individual beads placed in black wax. He hangs on the wall. To his right are two frogs--one Fimo clay, the other pewter. They don't have names. The small armadillo was my Christmas gift from G a few years ago and is named Austin. The shark has no name but is a small bath toy that can squirt water. They all live on top of canisters and get baths on Saturdays.

Trout


Hand-carved and hand-painted in either Malaysia or Thailand, he has lovely details. He is a "flying" fish hanging on nylon line from the recessed light panel above the window.

Finally, there's the

"Duck" that's not

. . . whom I wrote about in an earlier post.

Frogblog

Merry Christmas!

I received a few lovely gifts, and this was the theme (yes, singular) of the day:


Frogs. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil frogs! They fit on the window sill. They are supposed to go in the garden, but we have an evil squirrel posse. The squirrels regularly knock over pots and break them, so I am not about to let them near my frogs.

I also received a large, heavy hand-carved onyx paperweight frog, and a pair of frog sterling silver earrings. None of the people who gave these gifts to me knew someone else was giving me something froggy. For me, it was serendipidous. The gifts were brilliant individually, but taken together they were a hoppy opus.

So, the Tyke saw the three frogs on the window sill and said, "Mom, is the last one 'taste no evil,' or 'smell no evil'? Which is it?"

Yep. You would expect such a question from the "gifted program" kid with highest marks in LANGUAGE ARTS who also asked today, when we were watching the director's cut version of Amadeus, "Mom, is there a difference between a 'bistro' and a 'maestro'?"

Yes. In one you hope to taste no evil. From the other, you hope to hear no evil.

Why a Duck?

Get it? You will soon. In the meantime, if you haven't seen all the Marx Brothers movies, go rent them. If you can, start with "A Night at the Opera," and wait patiently for the stateroom scene. Then watch the other movies and find out which one the Why a Duck joke is in; I can't remember just now.

So. Back to the duck I intended to talk about. We recently returned from a great vacation in Wellfleet, our favorite village in Cape Cod. I was going through our receipts and found one from my favorite fun stuff and fun kitsch shop. (I am a kitsch ho. But most of it isn't displayed because it makes my friends nervous.) One receipt, unlike any others, had been handwritten. The items I bought are already displayed at home. But when I read the list, I was shocked to find: "Wooden duck hook."

Here is the "wooden duck hook":


Yeah, it's a duck, all right. The cashiers live and work in Wellfleet, a FISHING VILLAGE on CAPE COD. And they must get strafed by ducks and duck doo and ducks dropping clams and crabs on rocks and duck cries along the beach. Well, guess what, girls? I was born in Long Beach, CA and grew up near Huntington Beach, CA and even despite all the years I spent on the beach with my head baking in the sun, I managed to learn the difference between this kind of bird and ducks.

Here's the receipt, just for proof (see item #3, for $7.00):


And, yeah, I also got two excellent early-print etchings of whales and sea turtles. But at least those were listed by the appropriate name of the artist. Glad the cashier didn't try to identify the animals depicted.

Things We Do for Love

Yes, it's been months since I posted regularly. Cain't hep it. First it was holidays with the back and asthma, then I started writing a billion short articles for an educational company I contract for, and got so swamped with research and actual "real work" writing that I was too tired to hit the keyboard anymore. Not to mention the overwhelm-ment of constantly updating a couple of high-maintenance websites. Much of the time now I just want to press the off button. (I first mistyped that as the "oof" button.)

Our special buddy, our neighbor's dog, Luke (full name: Lucas, a.k.a. Cool Hand Luke) is visiting here on a dog daycare basis this week because his mom has gone to Florida on a birthday visit to her mom, who will be 89. It is a real joy to have Luke keeping me company during the day, and he's so funny--that is, most of the time, if he's awake, that is. Four-legged entertainment.


Well, I'll be right back after I go take a Benadryl. Sometimes I'm a bit allergic. This time it's making my face itch.
Thanks. I'm back.

So we had a blizzard and around 12:00 Luke decided he wanted to go out. (He tells me by standing next to me and wagging, then putting his paw on my knee, then nearly jumping in my lap). The snow was so deep it went up to his shoulders. As always, he was sure there were chipmunks under there and he stuck his whole head down in the snow next to the lamp post. He gets confused when he hears the snow squeak and crunch under my boots, too--that noise must mean more rodents to hunt, so he chases my feet and digs at them.

Luke is a Welsh Terrier, and as such his coat is a little wiry and very curly. He picked up a small snowball in every curl and when we got in the house I realized what a nightmare it was going to be. Thank goodness we don't have carpet! I covered "his" chair with a fitted sheet, but he decided he didn't want to be on "his" chair, he wanted to be next to me on the sofa. I had to keep putting him back down. As he warmed up, he walked everywhere in our open floor plan family room level, and thawed as he moved. I mopped, but to no avail; the chunks kept falling off. Finally I realized I might as well wait until he was entirely melted. Then I dried him off with a towel. The toll on my socks did not go unnoticed.

Wait, wait, here comes the wag and the paw. It's been a little over three hours; I have to go take him out again. There go another pair of socks . . .

Oh, this was good. With great ebullience, he plowed and bounded through the snow. Knew right away what he was out for. Left his golden salutes. But then a peculiar thing happened. This is something I've NEVER seen before. He wanted to play for a while, but realized the front yard was pure snow, to high to play in and waaaaay too cold. He quickly turned back toward the house . . . we clomped our way down the trail to the porch patio. And then, just before we got to the door, Luke remembered why he had wanted to wander the front yard. He crouched, and did the inevitable. On the slate porch! Great. Right there where the kids would land when they unsuspectingly tramped down the path and arrived at the (formerly) pristine porch.

Sorry, I've gotta leave. Puddles are forming all over the floor, and I have to find a third pair of socks. And a shovel.