“Why Cats Paint: a Theory of Feline Aesthetics.” If you fancy cats as I do, you won’t want to give this book a miss. There’s a link to the authors’ website on the right, but my personal recommendation is to buy the book. “Buy it,” I said. Not, “Check it out of the library.” You’ll want this one on your coffee table for company to browse. Allow me to quote two reviews from the book’s jacket.

“’About once every decade in the art world, a book emerges to galvanize our collective psyche and, in so doing, brilliantly encapsulates the culture, defining a generation of artists.’ Elle”

and

“’Yes, cats can paint. The phenomenon has to do with territorial marking, acrylic paint smelling a little like cat pee and a lot of pet spare time.’ Newsweek”

Are you with me? Then stick around.

I encountered this brilliantly formatted volume while on an island holiday with my foster sister. “Island” is a misleading term when applied to a dot of land with scarcely 1500 actual residents, two fire stations, no recreational facilities, and no town except the “village” which contains a tiny bookshop hardly bigger than the Borzoi behind the counter. Like the dog, the shop was exceptional (“They ship for free!” Marilyn volunteered), and the shelves held an eclectic assortment of things you would not have expected to find there, among them, “Cats Who Paint.” My sis bought it without hesitation, a souvenir for me.

Dinner that night was to be mussels seethed in white wine. Marilyn had left the husband at home, so it devolved to me, inexperienced, to get the cork out of the wine bottle. By the time the deed was done, we’d laughed ourselves silly and, well, there really was far too much wine for one pot of shellfish, so we drank it. For the record, I very seldom (emphasis on “very”) imbibe.

While Marilyn was cooking, I picked up the book and began reading passages aloud.

Let me say this: “Why Cats Paint” is a serious presentation. It is fascinating, if slightly dry reading. Imagine, if you will, “Why Jackson Pollock Painted.” In its pages, you will examine the history of feline art, its psychology, its execution and the artists at its forefront. The documentation is excellent, the photography superb.

At first, I thought my leg was being pulled. By the time I’d finished reading it (later that week, at home), I had tears in my eyes.

Yes, buy the book. Buy an extra copy for a cat-lover in your life, and be sure they call their local bookshop to request any of the sources cited in the bibliography. As the lady at the store I visited today told me, “You won’t believe it, but I actually get people in here who request those books in the back.”

I would have, too…until I came to “Blue Bike Blues.”

Returning home from a rather pointless day at the water’s edge, I sat down to compose my daily literary masterpiece. The blank document that Word provided between its grey ruled margins begged for tracks upon its virgin snowfield, but as soon as the horns of a W or Y would appear, my abrupt movement would startle the verbal beast back into the shrubbery. Patiently, I would subside again into watchfulness at the keyboard, still as the stone I’d perched on by the river, intent as I had been while watching my motionless line. With a hunter’s keenness, I could sense the herd of verbiage just beyond my vision, but sight of it I never gained.

With reluctance, I pulled open the desk drawer and extracted a folder. “Articles,” it said on the tab. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

There is only so much you can say about going fishless, and fewer ways you can hold a reader’s attention when the story’s conclusion is transparent from the first. If I had not been tired from my labours as a hunter-gatherer…the clambering over of rocks at riverside, the endless trips ‘twixt tackle box and shore…if I had not been bone-weary from my efforts, I would never have considered a reprint of a tale I’d written several years ago.

One seldom sees the direction a course of events is taking unless in hindsight. The day had started badly and off-course with malfunctions and delays being the general rule, and showed no signs of veering into a new route when I landed and released a trout no larger than a big sardine. Nevertheless, it gave me cause to gloat since I, not Sande, had caught it. “Well, we didn’t get skunked,” I kidded him, with stress upon the “we.”

By definition, then, we were defeated at the end of our adventure, and when we parted, I went to the computer to open Word’s blank page. An hour later, as I opened the drawer and pulled out the folder, “Articles,” I should have paid attention to that sound behind me. It was my karma, affronted by a reprint, creeping up for an attack.

Sande, on the other hand, called home. There was no answer, and the day had light and warmth to spare, so he pulled off into a local campground because he saw some people fishing there. Among them was a face he recognized: my neighbor Clyde (himself a fisherman of great renown), and Clyde was leaving with a limit in his creel. Now I, at the moment of this meeting and for several hours more, was on line with the phone tied up in bits and bytes, and bless his soul, he claims he tried to call me. In barely half an hour, and with eggs donated by my neighbor, Sande caught himself two fish.

Life ain’t fair.

Frogs are the oldest and wisest of the Earth’s peoples. Theirs was the first Dreaming, before Man ever came down from the Sky World.

So long ago now, that the Frogs sang their magic into the land, calling to the four directions with their voices, “Gurr! gurr!” So long since they sang the water into being, so long since they danced their first footprints into the mud. With the wind they sang, and with the trees danced in dark woodlands. They drank of the water and flourished in its goodness, and then the first Frogs grew old and died, leaving their spirits clinging to the marsh grasses, waiting to animate the generations of Frog children in the new land.

For many years, the Frog people lived in happiness and well-being in the world they had created, and the other Dreamings sprang into existence in the hollows the Frogs had left for them to inhabit. All things rejoiced in the water which had been the Frogs’ first creation, from the Rocks who stood silent under the rain and the Lizards who scurried across the arid desert, to the Birds who flew through the Sky World’s lowest reaches. Thus it was for many years, with stars above the living land, until there came a darker time.

Wise with the spirits of his many ancestors, it happened that an old Frog shaman felt a sickness in the blood of his land. He could not see it, for it was larger than his eyes could perceive, and it hid in the labyrinthine heart of the world quite out of reach. Ueh, it was a bad, deep thing, that sickness he could neither see nor name. Hopeful but in sadness, the shaman sang his ancient magic in a voice cracked with age, “Gurr! gurr!” but the sickness was powerful and kept its grip. He danced as wildly as his old bones would let him, but the sickness only laughed and was not afraid.

The old shaman knew that there was one last thing to be done. He plunged into the sickened water and drank it up into himself to heal it with his body and spirit, though it might cost him his own life.

And that was what it did. The sickness was so large that he could not contain it, no matter how he tried. He drank, and it swelled within him, and at last the wise old Frog shaman burst apart. His own spirit and the spirits of his ancestors fled into the scattering shards of bright water and fell, drop by drop, sliding down the tall reeds of the marsh.

The seasons turned and the children of the Frogs emerged, but none was whole, for each of the ancestral spirits had sacrificed some portion of itself to gain a greater magic.

Listen! The Frog children are singing the water, “Gurr! gurr!” They are calling to the four directions, they are dancing in the mud.

The story is done. The human storyteller hops ponderously away from the campfire, and lays her frog mask aside.

Footnote: This modernization of the Kurnai Koori (Queensland, AUS) legend of Tiddalick offers hope in time of worldwide crisis in the frog population and the wider biosphere. At present, great numbers of froglings are hatching out with deformities: missing legs, extra eyes, displaced organs. No continent is unaffected.

For more information of the Dreamtime and Australian Aboriginal legends, refer to the excellent works of Jean A. Ellis, “This is the Dreaming” and “From the Dreamtime.”

I believe one of the apartments has been rented! A few moments ago, I stood at the kitchen window and saw an object passed to someone in the interior. It could have been a tiny twig or bit of grass, but I suspect it was a bug for the manner in which it was accepted.

They are amazingly covert in setting up housekeeping, these violet-green swallows, once they’ve chosen their residence. I seldom see them enter or leave during nest-building time. Admittedly, I don’t stand at the window like a hunter in a blind, but as frequently as I wash dishes, you’d think I couldn’t miss the action.

Each year, I provide two birdhouses for their consideration. Violet-greens do not nest in colonies like many other swallows, and prefer their domiciles to be at least 20 feet from their nearest neighbor. One of the two rental cottages is on the north wall of the garage which is used only for storage, and this is the house the birds generally elect to use. The other hangs in the carport, placed there in self-defence, because the peak of the roof directly above the car is considered prime real estate. The prospective tenants seldom spare the little bungalow in the beams a glance.

Here a morality issue arises. Despite my most inventive efforts to deter them (including putting a third swallow cottage up directly in place of last year’s mud nest), they insist on building above my parking spot and, tidy little critters that they are, when they clean their abodes of detritus and unsavories, they drop the refuse on my nice, new car.

Yes, swallows are tidy. They carefully remove the by-products of ingestion from their nests and deposit them elsewhere, ensuring the health of themselves and their young. They can’t be faulted for their industry or intent.

I am benefited by these graceful birds who devour our overabundant mosquitoes with the avidity of a child in a candy store, and the carport offers safety from predatory squirrels and raccoons, shelter even from driven rain, a slightly warmer temperature. Ghandi I am not, but I cannot bring myself to harm a creature in its innocence, for I believe they have as much right to the Earth as I, and these are helpful and invited.

What, then, of the paint job?

If we draw back a pace and view this dilemma objectively, the conclusion is quite simple: It’s the car that’s out of kilter. Should we be surprised?

Pretty soon, it’ll be time for tourists up here. They flock to our scenery in the summertime like ants to a picnic, and are just about as welcome. No, that’s unjust. They bring much-needed revenue into a community comprised mostly of out-of-work loggers, and as an aside, provide a bit of amusement for the natives with their antics.

Let’s take the guy in the sport coat and wing tips, for example. He’s never seen a deer up close, so heedless of the cars behind him, he’ll screech to a halt and block Clyde’s driveway to watch Bambi browsing the front yard. As he sits there with his camera pointed toward Clyde’s garden, he has no idea how hard it is to keep a crop of carrots in the ground!

The tourists will stop for a coyote. “Look! A wolf!” you’ll hear them say. Why, they’re having a genuine Wilderness Experience! To us, it’s just a neighbor who makes a nodding visit and then moves on to daily chores.

The greatest traffic-stopper, though, is the assembly of elk that meet in the pasture across the street toward sunset. Drawn from three separate herds, they can number over 100, and even the locals think that’s a sight to behold (never mind that they rush home to oil their rifles). The city folk, however, go a bit berserk. Hardly a one can resist the temptation to make strange noises, and although squeals and grunts in supposed imitation of elk bugling are fairly common, many of the interlopers honk their horns or yell and shout. The more audacious sort take action.

You and I know better than to approach an elk, however cautiously, but our man in wing tips missed that chapter in the book. In the waning light of day, two categories of fool go afield: at moderate risk is the photographer wanting a close-up; at high risk, the adventurer goes on the chase.

Now, the two masters of the harem don’t take kindly to this sport, as you can well imagine, but as the animals move to put distance between themselves and the threat, the two-legged creature reacts by moving faster toward them, exactly as a predator would do. As the cows mass together for safety, the elder bull stations himself to brazen out his enemy.

Well, if our tourist is smarter than he appears to be, he’ll retreat. If not, and if he survives his close encounter our wildlife, maybe he’ll come back next month when the cougar is likely to be around. I hope he buys his postcards at the mom-and-pop first!

The memory has the scent of lavender as I open my grandmother’s button box in my mind’s eye. Inside are treasures executed in marcasite, carved of bone and ivory, stamped in metal, and studded with rhinestones chipped and dulled. If some match, it’s happenstance, for they have been gleaned from worn dresses and frayed shirtcuffs, separated from their kin and applied to different garments until many have been orphaned as result. I, a small child, sift them through my fingers, and the lavender pervades.

I know they had stories to tell, but I was young and not interested in histories when I had them in my hands. Some may have belonged to Old-old, the great-grandmother who sewed meticulous quilts with her bent, arthritic fingers. Did she smell of lavender? My sense of her is dim.

The buttons smelt of Yardley’s, and so clearly is my grandmother illustrated by that scent that I cannot separate its fragrance from her image, as I also see my father in the aroma of “Old Spice.”

The room is dimly lit, a bedroom, and the precious box of buttons has been opened as a rare and special pleasure. They tumble out upon the thick bedspread, falling helter-skelter like a scattering of runes unread. Two draw me. One is an obvious choice for a child: a “diamond” set in black Bakelite. The other is broken, unique among its fellows and a riddle: why is it there, preserved in its uselessness? The child does not formulate the question in the button, and its answer is lost in dead years. I touch each one, carefully and separately, to acknowledge its individual presence. I am baptized as an animist at the ripe old age of four, and the souls of buttons address me with a quote from lavender.

My grandmother gathers the existential buttons and returns them to their box. I will see them only once again in life.

Far in the back of my attic was a box that gave all appearances of never having been opened. A wealth of clutter stood between me and it, some worth salvaging, some not, accumulated over many years and many travels. There were trunks of needlework directions, crates of hobby paraphernalia, files regarding crows and physics, Aborigines and mountaineering, raising sheep, woods lore, Star Trek, art and whatnot: varied, saved for future reference. Cobwebs hung thickly from the beams of this enclosure, obstructing ingress, and the thick mat of dust on its floor testified that no entry had been made in a long count of months.

A box most enigmatic, sitting in the shadow! It looked capacious. Was it full or empty? I thought, “I’d like to know,” for certainly it was a useful container, hidden back behind the puzzles and old almanacs, but one requiring labour to bring into the fore.

For many days I worked at moving my miscellany, pushing through the veil of dust that lingered on the items. I heaved and hauled and struggled with determination, and felt the pain of age in lazy muscles. Diligently, I dragged down the clotted webs like ragged curtains, scattered all the frantic mice from hidden corners, and swept and vacuumed avidly. I could scarcely believe so much stuff had been crammed into so very little space.

Bit by bit, the old place began looking brighter as I systematically rearranged. Yes, there was definite improvement. Things were more orderly, if still a bit confused, and set for easy access if their time arose. After a few weeks, I had made a major inroad, and there at the end of the highway sat the box, the great unknown.

It wobbled lightly when I nudged it, and gave no resistance when I pulled it toward me. Were my hopes in vain? The flaps of the lid were spiral-folded; it had been used before. With a gentle tug, the flaps opened, and I saw that it was empty.

That was what I’d hoped for: one empty box in my cluttered, rustic attic. Now I’m packing.

Wrapped and padded well with grammar, the packet of verbs fits nicely beside the stack of adverbs, and a welter of pronouns nest in the center by the nouns with their articles attached. Handy bags of prepositions keep miscellaneous conjunctions from rattling as I fill my mental carton with collected Spanish words.

During last fall’s salmon season, Sande went on a solo flight. I had some other engagement which kept me from the water, and when the fish are running, such behaviour can be excused.

The day was fine, so he set off to the place we’d last wet our lines. A number of other fishermen were in position along the bank, none “doing much good,” as the vernacular would have it, but Sande was undeterred. He scouted around, wise in the ways I’d taught him, and chose his spot to cast where accumulated brush broke the turbulence of the river, a natural lie. Lord knows I’d drummed that lesson into his head: “No risk, no gain,” I’d tell him. “You’ve got to fish the spots no other fisherman would dare, and so you lose a lure or fly, or wind up a little wet, you’ll have a big one for your pains.” If fish were holding, they’d be in the snags.

As he told this story and described it by its landmarks, I tried to place it in my mind and came up dry. It often happens that I instantly forget the name of a chance acquaintance and won’t be able to say if he had a beard or glasses once I’ve turned my head, but I’ll remember a rock no larger than my thumb’s last joint if it’s crossed my field of vision. However, I assumed a fault in memory, and thus erred in the presumption that he must have been slightly upstream of a prior glory hole.

I hung on every word the man delivered. I could hear a fish tale coming. Sande is an excellent narrator, and seldom embellishes a tale. It’s true! An honest fisherman, Diogenes! You may put down your lantern and rejoice! The story reached a fevered pitch, and I was breathless at its supposed climax, for here he caught not one, but two nice salmon in fairly rapid succession!

Anxiously, I sought to get a word into the narrative to ask, "What on? What were you using?" but he was too busy gloating to hear me (so I thought), or declined to answer. All I felt sure he’d heard me utter was a pained, "Two? You got two???"

His eyes met mine and never wavered. "I hadn't noticed,” he continued, “ but there was somebody else fishing near me, and I guess I must have said it aloud, but I said, 'What do I need her for?' And then I woke up."

It went past me for the space of ten seconds. The mind just wasn't ready for the punch line yet, but he'd delivered it in true Sande fashion. He's like that. Getcha right square between the eyes when you least expect it.

And here I was, ready to chuck all and head for the river.

No state of mind is as hopeful as that of the fisherman awaiting a bite, nor as despairing. The “last” cast is never last until daylight fails the sky and we are forced homeward empty-handed, with the weight of defeat heavy on our shoulders. Of remedies for the condition fishless, we have a creelful: rainbowed arrays of bait, come-hither lures, scents foul and fair, and feathered marvels; lengths of line, weights preponderant, floats and sinks and hooks and blades to make excuses ‘round about. Some one of them is faulty, not we, the masters of the craft.

We look for our redemption in the scapegoat weather, in the moon’s phase. Blame the water, rising, falling; blame the engineer who charts the dam. Our lines soar and leap with undeniable enthusiasm from our rod tips, but fall to fallow waters through no error of their own.

In every second ‘til the last, we expect success for our proud efforts. The last, we are deflated. Yet in defeat, we are not bereft of our hopeful natures. If bitten once or twice, or half a dozen times by the dreaded skunk, we do not shy, not hardly! We are long on faith, and the animal wants taming. There are fish, and we shall have them. It is our Angler’s Creed.

Oh, my aching back! The mind and body can’t agree on how old I am, and both had forgotten their last encounter with the lopping shears. Drat trees and shrubs that send up runners!

The Whatzit Tree is an oddity. It weeps like a willow, bears a fruit small, red and round which is no more than a cherry pit with skin. The leaf is cherry-like as well and, but for the large white apple blossoms it puts on in May, you’d think you had it classified. A “flowering” species it is not. The leaves precede the blooms which nearly hide the greenery when open. Oh, and does it make runners! Confined to a rockery that resembles an old stone well, they spring up in a veritable withy forest ‘round its trunk.

That was today’s project: mayhem upon withies, a task meant for long-handled cutters and shoulders much younger than my own. “Give me a fulcrum, and I will remove that twig,” I said, contorting into a position which placed one arm of the lopper on firm ground, the blades around a shoot. “Uh! Uuuu-uh!” I chanted, invoking the god of levers. I stood on the handle to secure it firmly. “Uh! Uh! Uh!” With both hands on the upper member, I drove my body weight repeatedly toward the ground. The cutters squeaked against cambium and resistance gave way in a satisfying crunch.

The lopping shears are dull, I will admit. I picked up the fruit of my labour and observed it: eighteen inches long and thick as my scrawny thumb. One down, at least thirty more to go. Visions of cortisone danced in my head. I commenced a new attack on a thinner withy. “Uh-uuuh!” and it too fell.

There is coming a day when Giraffe will arrive with a pry bar and a sledge to chink apart the rockery and take the rocks as his bounty, permitting me to mow up to the tree’s base. Perhaps I am reaching acceptance of my years as I admit that boulder bustin’ is beyond my capability. Tiny, female, pushing sixty, it nonetheless affronts my pride.

When the Whatzit Tree at last stood free of runners and the yellow daffodils could raise their sunny heads, I moved on to survey the lilac, the forsythia and other great offenders. I was in an apprehending mood, despite the hazards, and if next week I see the doctor for my shoulder, at least the task is done. Had I not done the work today, tomorrow I’d be older.

Today is the day my father never saw.

The 21st of March was the first day of spring in 1956: spring, the season of planting fresh-tilled earth, of baby chicks and ducklings, of sweet and freshening rains, of green buds and new shoots, and of life bright and new in every cranny of Nature.

My father was a farmer, having come from solid Luxembourgian German stock. His family were sharecroppers in Wisconsin and never owned their land, only the herd of milch cows, a pig or two, and fowl. Ma, my grandmother, shelled out an old-world plenitude of children. Nine there were, four girls and two boys. From the time he was old enough to cart a bucket, my father worked in the barn alongside Grandpa or the siblings, so there is no denying that a kinship with the earth was in his blood.

So too he was a war hero, Marine survivor of a POW camp in exotic Manchuria, and from his sojourn there, he brought home a cruel souvenir: diabetes. It was this disease that took him before the sun rose that fine morning, as he had known it would do. “I won’t see the light of spring,” he forecast, and it was true.

He taught me to dowse, my father did. He could read between the lines in Mother Nature’s diary, ferret out her secrets, translate her coded messages. One day he saw the secret writing, and it said, “For this man, spring will not be.”

The life force recycles to the universal mother. Our elements and compounds return to the earth, recombine, and are born restored to another form, in another season. It might as well be spring.

Who would have thought that while studying Spanish, one could re-learn that the bloom of a sunflower is not one flower, but many? I knew it in a previous life; a sunflower, after all, is a member of the Compositae, but it was knowledge I had shelved.

“Un girasol parece una sola flor, pero no es así,” advises a wonderful children’s book called “Las Flores.” “¡Cada parte amarilla es una flor!” I did a double-take at the close-up picture and saw that indeed it was so. I could have gotten the question right on a botany test before class was dismissed, although I might not have finished the whole exam for time spent thinking it through. “Oh yeah,” I would recall, “seeds form in ovaries, right? And sunflower seeds are just there, sort of, all by themselves and they have to have been fertilized somehow. So where’s the stamen? Oooo, little feller, ain’t he?”

A romance language, did you say?

Whether or not I will ever use a foreign tongue or my reborn awareness of composite sexuality makes no difference. I learn for the sake of knowing, for the purpose of keeping synapses snapping and the mind flexible. Like the muscles, the mind needs a regular workout program to keep fit, and the more varied the regimen, the greater the benefit to be attained.

Spanish is my latest fancy, and there have been countless others, causing me to be accused of being a butterfly at the Tree of Knowledge. It’s true that I flit from subject to subject in Lepidopteral fashion as I sample the assorted nectars. Maybe HTML is in bloom, with chaos theory budding. Let me taste it all in its season! It’s a gift, this errant, curious fluttering, and the true reward comes when some two species unexpectedly cross-pollinate, like Spanish and sunflowers.

Suggested reading: the “Lee y aprende” series published by Heinemann, which includes “Las Flores,” “El Zorrillo,” “El Oso Pardo” and “El Mapache,” all authored by Patricia Whitehouse.
This one’s for you, Pablo.

We have come to the time of year when I mount my soapbox to bemoan my enforced participation in one of the most time-wasting, fruitless affectations ever thought up by civilized man.

If you look out my bedroom window, you can see its footprint. Around the perimeter of the septic tank (an item of dubious lineage and condition), canary grass stands a foot high, its leaves razor-sharp and excellent for making whistles. Less vigorous species mound beneath the fence rails, stripe the driveway, menace the irises and split the walkway, clearly having no function but to be a nuisance.

Whoever invented lawns, anyway? And whose bright idea was it to keep them cropped to a tidy height?

Around here, “lawn” is defined as the area surrounding your house that is not forest and has not been gravelled. It consists variously of grasses, dandelions, milkweeds, chamomile, dock, moss, alpine strawberries, yerba buena (a sorry misnomer), sourgrass and the occasional thistle, and it all needs mowing.

I resist lawn mowing powerfully. I detest the sport. Although I use Clyde’s riding mower and the task requires no physical labor, I postpone it scientifically with excuses that the yard is too damp with dew or the day is too chilly or too warm until at last I am moved to action by acknowledgement of the unavoidable.

Having bearded the lion in his den, then, it is time to take serious action. If one waits until the weather forecast is for a sunny, dry spell, it’s possible to truncate the mowing season with as little effort as it takes to hew the grass. With no regard for the mower blade, one lowers the deck as far as will still allow forward motion, and then one proceeds to effect a buzz-cut any marine would be proud to wear. With a little help from old Sol, the necessity for frequent prunings ceases in early July.

We are sadly a long hour from July. There are many weekly transits to be made, ‘round and ‘round in ever-narrowing rectangles: foolishness, all of it repeating and to little purpose. Grass was meant to grow. Let me ignore it for the moment, turning a blind eye to the window on the west until, like death and taxes, I can evade it no longer.

The weather paints rainbows between sun and shower, bridging from one moody canvas to the next. One moment grey, the next golden, sprinkles fall regardless and the air is acute. Clouds lapse amid the gashed sides of the foothills, fading and gathering in a continued exchange between crest and gully, their shredded lower margins caught among the firs and spruce whereon lies a patina of newly fallen snow. The felted sky parts near zenith, raked by sunlight currying, shot through with fibrous light. In the beneficence of solar grace, an eagle wheels on outflung wings, not once stroking until it dives into the nap of trees.

Ebb and flow, the atmosphere is a quickened tide in the sea of the season. Its waves ride in and out upon the beach, bearing flotsam of hail or snow incoming, and outgoing, scour the shore of any trace. Surge and regression, the tides of Spring are fickle, and keep to no table. If one goes combing among them, it’s best to be prepared.

I’d like to say I can remember my father’s bright red Farmall tractor, but I can’t be certain that I do. Memory is odd like that. In the eye of my mind, my dad stands beside the machine, smiling and bronzed by the sun, and then I see him in the same pose, but his companions are two mammoth mongrel plowhorses and he has their bridles in his hand. Which is truth? Which is error? I remember many things which may be false or truly recollected, and which may be proven rarely. Fact or fancy, does it matter? These memories are only mine and only dear to me.

As I drove through our local farmland today, I saw a Farmall in a driveway. It was brilliant with a new coat of hard-fired red paint, glistening like a showroom model. I didn’t stop to ask if it had an engine, and if so, did it function? I simply regarded and admired it until it had fled the tail of my eye.

My thoughts then refocused, my father central in the picture. An orchard of cherry trees stood to one side of him, rows of grapes upon the other. He was young and handsome, healthy, not aware that his time on earth was a perfunctory appointment. I watched him as he rode the Farmall through the fields, wore blisters on his backside, reproached and coaxed the soil until it yielded bounties of corn and asparagus. I saw him on the hayrake, horses in the lead, laying windrows to be baled.

I see my father now, brown as a berry, standing beside those Percheron wannabes, or is it a tractor? This I do not know. Today, by dint of a chance sighting, I rode a sparkling bright red Farmall across the upturned sod of memory where the seeds of past years sprout and grow.

The wind is in my way. It stands between me and a roaring conflagration of yard debris that has accumulated over the winter.

I’ve made tidy piles of prunings, but the old Doug fir isn’t as obsessive. Beneath it range fans of greenery, brittle sticks of old wood, a few large branches and uncountable cones, and it’s all the wind’s fault, so you’d think it could cooperate a bit in the cleaning up by absenting itself when its presence is not desired. But no, today it blows, wheezing gently past the boundaries of my fire permit, keeping me from the call of duty.

Since the forecast day of substantial rain dawned clear and bright, it seemed only logical to engage in some form of outdoor activity. I took the tops off molehills, smoothed the berm of pea gravel left by Clyde’s winter plowing, filled in potholes with purloined county rock. My bum wing objected slightly to raking, but there were not enough weeds between the budding daffodils to trouble with, and the only available fence wire was either too stiff or too soft to stretch between the grape posts.

I reconsidered burning brush. It’s a dirty task, but rewarding in its way, and I enjoy it. The wind had slacked when I went inside, ostensibly to change into “grubbies,” but by the time I reached the bedroom, ol’ Doug fir was waving, waving, and I knew I’d been fooled again.

The burning permit stipulates 5 MPH, an entirely unreasonable figure. This is a valley, born at the base of a glaciated mountain, and experiences two conditions: wind is either upslope or downslope, except for days of air stagnation when burning’s flatly not allowed. Our fire department is lenient, and won’t cite you if the breeze is coming westerly and blowing in a casual manner, but today’s wind lifted the white tags on Clyde’s fence markers and flattened the column of smoke coming from his chimney. The mesh of piled twigs and boughs would have to wait.

The bratty wind torments me. I was not to be cheated of my day outdoors, and so brought the bicycle out of hiding, thinking to outfox it. As I rode up the hill, it paced contrarily down valley, and when I turned and pedalled homeward, it changed and smote me in the face.

Dozens of winged creatures flitted across my field of vision, delicate and ephemeral, clumsily graceful like moths in their flight. They wove through my sight in muted hues, pitching and swerving through a field of open air, beating wings against no breath of breeze, describing a fascinating dance of curves and angles with no apparent pattern. I suddenly realized that they were feathered, unlike any insect seen in this world, and perhaps in the back of my mind I knew I was dreaming that I was surrounded in a flock of living feathers, or perhaps not. I watched, intrigued.

I am a shaman.

A wispy ‘dragonfly’ approached and hovered. I was afraid to reach out, lest it sting me. Its tail or body (I’m uncertain which) was comprised of two slender, barred hackles of the type most coveted by fly-tiers the world over, and they waved behind the flier like the thready appendages of a Pale Morning Dun. Black and white they were, and I wanted to risk a touch but feared it until the matter was settled as the ‘insect’ dragged the tips harmlessly across the back of my hand.

Then, from the dream’s horizon, a more bird-like creature lifted wings in flight and came toward me. Pale, pale yellow was its plumage, and translucent, shimmering like mylar. Its feathers glinted prismatically with brilliant but faded rainbow colors as it turned in the sunlight, mustering the courage to approach. Repeatedly, it would flit away like a hummingbird and then return, each time coming closer. I characterized it as a macaw, though it was only of cockatiel size; it had the black-lined cheeks and beak of the macaw. I lifted a hand to offer it a perch. It darted away, uncertain. I was patient, and raised my hand again.

Gradually, with no word spoken, I tamed it with my body language. It lighted on my finger with its little talons gripping gently. I ventured to lay a thumb atop them, and then I spoke: “You are so beautiful,” I said.

In that moment, I realized (or thought I realized) that it was Cocoa, the cockatoo who was my life and breath. I woke in tears.

I related the dream to my mother before checking my email, not expecting it to have foundation. As I read aloud the note from Pam, the first in weeks, the chills ran over us. Pam was writing one-handed, she explained, the other hand holding a dying Petal. Yes, Petal was old for a parakeet, and although I did not know her well, I remember her beautiful color…so softly yellow, with bits of pale green and blue on her little wings.

A slow metamorphosis has begun, one which will take the kitchen from culinary center to greenhouse in the span of a month, six weeks at most. Instead of the aromas of herbs and stews and broths, the room will soon be filled with the scent of damp peat and verdure, and thus it shall be until the early days of June.

The first signs are evident in the south window. Six peat pellets rest in a plant saucer, five of them showing hair-like tendrils of green. Adjacent to these, another container holds three more, full of promise and potential, seeded only a few days ago. These are houseplants, however, destined never to see pure sunlight, only that which is filtered through a pane of glass.

The true conversion will start with a planting of pennyroyal, functional herb that keeps the insect population at bay in dresser drawers, closets and chests when dried and sewn into tidy calico packets and salted away. Only a few starts are necessary, only a few seeds will be sown. I’ve learned from experience that over-enthusiasm is a dangerous thing.

As weeks rapidly progress and plantings become too numerous to house in saucers, the clutter-collecting tops of washer and drier will be cleared, seed trays placed upon them, and a four-foot double-tube wide-spectrum light will be suspended from thin chains below the cupboard. Herein, a problem is created. With the fixture in place, the lid of the washer cannot be fully opened when the trays have been removed. Laundry day takes on the aspect of a Project, capital P, in the interest of a garden filled with posies. Luckily, laundry is done weekly, not daily. And I shall tell myself it’s only a brief inconvenience.

Six to eight weeks before 1 June, I will seed something on the order of a dozen gazanias, 36 gomphrena for dried arrangements, 12 heteropappus (“What’s a heteropappus?” I said, looking at my list. “Oh! Those blue things that make such a lovely border!”), 24 pansies and a full flat of asters. The allotted space holds three trays containing 72 peat pellets each, and that takes care of two. For now, we’ll ignore the saucers that balance precariously on the edge for want of room, tantalizingly within reach of kitty fingers. This is a secondary problem I have not had to address previously.

Approximately five weeks later, the remaining flat will receive seeds of two different colours of statice, also for drying. By now, the first plantings will have set true leaves. By June, thready roots will be holding hands with each other regardless of species, and I’ll be counting down the days before the kitchen is returned to its rightful owner.

As gleefully as I approach this season, so do I leave it gleefully, weary of daily waterings and rotations to ensure that each of my charges receives adequate light. I will have tired of moving flora from laundry area to freezer every Sunday to access the washer and the lint trap. I will be glad, very glad when tender seedlings spend their first night out. I will enjoy my garden fully, these flowers I have cultivated until I begrudged their invasion of the kitchen, and when autumn comes, I’ll put my grudge aside when the first seed catalog arrives in the mail.

It happened before I could cognate what was coming to pass, and then I was writhing in agony.

A thundering, four-legged stampede rushed through the kitchen archway, bent on attack. A microsecond’s silence indicated that it had gone airborne and I turned, knowing its target. The hind feet lit on the cushion, the forepaws stretched over the back of the favorite oak chair, and impetus was not to be denied. Chair with cat in position pitched swiftly backwards. I reacted instinctively, thrusting a foot out to break the fall which would surely have wounded delicate, clawless pussy toes, soft toes which have had enough indignities inflicted on them for one lifetime. Ten pounds of cat and a heavy chair dropped like a millstone on my instep. At the moment of impact, Skunk launched toward the door with force, contributing more than a few ergs to the thrust and causing me to let fly a heterodyning howl remarkable for its lack of profanity. I was too pained to curse.

Have you ever been breathless with pain? I was. I folded double. I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t cry, couldn’t move. I wanted to sit down, stand up, hop on the other foot, anything to change my relationship with metatarsal misery, and couldn’t do a bit of it because my muscles no longer had synaptic interface with my brain.

I can’t say now if it was ten minutes or thirty seconds before I managed to sit down on the offending chair, there to ponder whether I was capable of reaching the living room. I hovered so long on the event horizon that I don’t even recall picking it up from the floor.

The foot is damaged, but perhaps not severely so. Contused, yes; broken, probably not, although the jury’s still out on that one. I’m not keen to put my weight on it. Is Skunk any wiser? Not likely! She had a thrilling ride on the carnival’s Falling Chair, and will no doubt want to buy another ticket as soon as the barker goes back to the booth.

Shovel in hand, I paid a visit to Clyde’s back forty today and brought home a pair of catnip starts in a plastic pail. I hadn’t considered where to put them before setting off.

The foot of the glacier isn’t too many miles up the road, you understand, and the worked, if not rock-free flowerbeds beneath the windows are to be husbanded for things of beauty rather than for functional herbs which have a tendency to spread and engulf. Since I am inclined to mow anything in my path (including plastic sacks, garden hoses, innocent shrubbery and visiting children), location in the open yard was not to be considered. Planters? One is full of tulips and a miniature rose, and the other two house thriving colonies of lingonberry and alpine strawberry.

Base of a fencepost, maybe? Naw, the moles undermine them. Below the bird feeder? Not with a clean conscience! Skunk lives indoors, but the population of feral cats is high, to say nothing of neighbours’ pets wandering far afield.

Between house and garage is a 10-foot wide strip known as the Barren Wasteland. I’ve planted it with wildflowers for many years on the abiding principle that if something is happy there, it can stay and go to seed, and more power to it. I garden by that principle: if it can survive my tender ministrations, good. If not, it wasn’t meant to grow in my care. The Barren Wasteland has been beautiful in its day, but now has gone mostly to white yarrow, tall gloriosa daisies, old-fashioned single hollyhocks, cornflowers, and the occasional wallflower, a tiny orange bloom that fills the evening with its sweet scent.

On one edge of the wildflower patch, I keep a few household herbs including horehound, a medicinal plant used in cough remedies and a member of the same family that brings us peppermint, spearmint and…catmint. Aha! I had found the spot! I set the starts at the base of the pluviometer post, watered them in. Mint is uncommonly hard to kill once it gets a footing, so I have no doubt it will do well in its appointed place.

Skunk always protests my absence, especially when I am in her sight beyond a pane of glass. As reward for her somewhat vocal patience, she was allowed to enjoy a small sample of things to come.

Little Willie is on my mind tonight, and those of you who equate that name with any of half a dozen musicians would be dead wrong. I mean Little Willie from “Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes,” fiendish child who inspired great mirth among his avid followers. He was famous for his inventive mayhem.

Willie shoved his sister Nell
In the family drinking well.
She’s still there because it kill’t her.
Now they’ll have to buy a filter!

(or variably)
Mother and Father loved their daughter,
But now they purify their water.

I was a gentle child, but I delighted in Little Willie’s antics. He was always getting into things I never quite had the courage to try. I wonder why? Would you say he was teaching by example?

Willie found some dynamite,
Couldn’t understand it, quite.
Curiosity never pays!
It rained Willie seven days.

In any event, Willie allowed my dark side to roam safely. Most children are attracted to the gruesome at some point in their development, and psychologists tell us that’s healthy. Modern youth has gone gothic. We had Willie.

He was up with the times, too. Why, I recall once when he sneaked into a nuclear facility and…well, read on!

Little Willie, full of glee
Put radium in Grandma’s tea.
Now he thinks it’s quite a lark
To see her shining in the dark.

Eventually, Willie was to meet his end, and small wonder. I miss him.

Little Willie’s dead and gone,
Of him we’ll hear no more.
What Willie thought was H2O
Was H2SO4.

Adieu, Willie!

Seismic activity is increasing in the Kermadec Islands, not only the frequency of temblors, but the intensity as well. This bears watching.

A second-hand report from a less-than-reliable source made mention of islands “someplace” that were “either sinking or rising,” and their populations were purportedly being advised to evacuate; information that I have not been able to substantiate but am inclined to credit based on known data, and I am assuming it refers to the South Seas until I am corrected.

This spate of tremors began around Christmastime, and although it has had calm periods of a week or more, the quakes are occurring quite too often. If I were an Islander, I’d be inclined to roll up my palm fronds, collect the family and start paddling the outrigger toward higher ground after a couple of months of shakers in the range of 5.0-7.0 Richter. I’m not referring to one per day, either. For example, there have been three in the last ten hours: 5.8, 6.3 and 5.5.

A fascinating thing about earthquakes, volcanoes and lahars: they are eminently enjoyable as long as they’re in somebody else’s back yard. I’ve personally been rattled severely a number of times, and I have been powdered with fine pumice more than once. I fled my home in panic under threat from the menace of mudflow, although it later proved to be a false alarm. I can assure you that none of the aforementioned events is fun firsthand, but I am on tenterhooks at the mention of subduction happening elsewhere, wanting it to be a Big One. I do not think of myself as an ambulance chaser, although the mental process must be closely akin.

So fixated upon this subject am I that my homepage is set to the USGS’s National Earthquake Information Center. Read what news you will, politics or sports or the social scene; I prefer a global overview. We have but one world to live upon, and if it’s coming apart, I’d like to be notified.

We’re into a daily calendar now, and today’s page turned up to reveal spring peepers caroling along the bank of the intermittent stream on the far side of the pasture. It’s a boggy place even in the driest part of an average summer, fenced by alders that pass tattered sunlight through their woody fingers like Midas fondling his golden hoard. Elk wander amid buds of cow parsnip and sweet coltsfoot as a solitary coyote scrabbles for a vole or mouse that has just darted down a hole near the water’s edge. A fluid abundance of life fills the valley now, flowing and eddying, zestful and gabbling with a million sounds.

There are geese in the sky, and ravens, paired or solitary; linnets strike a note of raspberry melody on green chords of Indian plum and ninebark. Some unknown chorister sings, “Heeee did-it! Heeee did-it!” to tattle on the snails emerging from their hidey-holes. Appoggiaturas of dew grace the nodding ferns.

Sight, sound and scent are the senses of spring. Inducing synesthesia, the chirrup of the peepers bears an odor of mouldering cottonwood leaves, pink currant blossoms chime in the ear, a whiff of moss overlays the eyes with a blanket of humid brown.

No creature may be held responsible for its actions in the flush of spring. It’s too much for the brain to process, this intense influx of information. To live the moment is all we may expect, and that is surfeit and to spare.

We begin tonight’s News with an epilogue to the tail given in yesterday’s entry:

The elusive suspect was apprehended in the act of trespass late Sunday evening, only to be subsequently chucked out of the courtroom by a lenient judge. The officer responsible for the arrest was given a commendation. This reporter ascertained that the reward was a large amount of Friskies Choice Chicken. Presumably, the company does not manufacture Skink Surprise. It is not known if others may have been involved in this latest series of crimes, so police are keeping a full-time watch on the area near the bookcase.

And now to today’s business:

Two fishermen were seen cruising the remote Haul Road today in a little red truck. It is believed that they were refugees from one of the state’s purportedly fishless areas, although this report could not be documented. The pair had in their possession a box of fresh nightcrawlers, several empty jars of Power Bait and three rainbow trout of reasonably large size when they returned to civilization. The trout were later fileted.

The weather was uncommonly fair for March with temperatures in the high fifties. Winds were southwesterly, light and pleasant.

Another late-breaking story reports the return of swallows to the area. All mosquitoes are advised to hover close to the small round openings in the wooden boxes just below the gutters, please!

In a sports-related follow-up, a spotter observed two heads of skunk cabbage on the lower portion of the Divide. It’s going to be a strong year for this team! Go skunks!

And there you have the News For Today! We’ll be back again tomorrow, so DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! Good night!

The kitty proved herself as a hunter late yesterday evening, and quite a wrasslin’ match ensued as I tried to rescue the skink she’d routed out of the fireplace screen. It had been minding its own business, although perhaps it made a devilishly slinky sound as it crept along the rod at the top of the knit metal mesh, or possibly a tiny foot had been briefly visible below the bronze-coloured frame.

Skunk had kept the fireplace under close surveillance for the better part of the day, and her stake-out finally paid off with a glimpse of the culprit’s tail. She was on the job quicker’n you could say, “Double-Oh Seven,” and I was only seconds behind, if a bit more like Maxwell Smart. But the Chief of Investigation bungled the nab, and the perp eluded her grasp. A high-speed pursuit erupted with the lizard leading, Skunk hot on its tail and yours truly bringing up the rear, reaching its climax when all three of us came head-to-head underneath the harpsichord.

As you might guess, that’s not one of the more brightly illuminated areas of the house. So, too, my weak and aging vision fails when the light is dim, contributing to the general blend of hues between cat, carpet and crawly thing. Certainly something was writhing between the paws of the cat, and I thought it fled to safety an inch or so beyond the shining jaws of death when I lifted her away from the spot where last I’d seen it, but quick and slick as a serpent, Skunk was out of my grip. She lit flat, as if pinning the interloper to the floor, then looked between her own front feet as if to say, “Well, where the hell is it? It was here a minute ago!”

I picked her up, thinking the skink might have escaped. She leapt away from me again and seized a writhing mouthful. I pried her jaws apart. Into my hand dropped the lizard’s tail, and only that, parted from its fundament as lizard tails are wont to be.

Where the skink may have gone, I can only speculate. Skunk kept a vigilant eye on the nearby bookcase until I forced her into bed, where she dreamt vividly twitchy dreams, exhausted by her fruitless labors and bereft of pride in accomplishment.

Ugh! Starlings! They’re back, and the only thing good you can say about their presence is that it’s a precursor to the arrival of the swallows whose homes and offspring they maraud.

It’s critical when providing housing for a specific bird species to make an opening of precise dimension. Swallows, for example, require an opening of 1 1/4” to 1 3/8” which does not permit ingress by a starling. As a matter of fact, a pudgy swallow might have trouble with the minimum allowable by code, as happened one day last spring.

Both parents had worked on construction of the wattle-and-daub interior chamber, and Mother had settled in to brood the eggs while Pop was out doing some hard yakka for the daily bugs for the pair. He was evidently industrious at his task, because when it came time for Mom to have a break, she got stuck in the doorway.

D’you remember how Winnie the Pooh got himself wedged into the Very Tight Place? Well, this was very like. At first, she thrust out her head and one shoulder. Obviously, something was amiss, so she withdrew and made another attempt. This was no more successful than the first try, but she was not yet distressed. “Maybe I ought to try the other wing,” she seemed to consider. That, too, was doomed to failure. She disappeared to the confines of the box.

A few minutes later, she tried again, this time with a bit more struggling. She shook her head, wiggled her shoulder, all to no avail. After several vain efforts, she again retreated.

Pop, in the meantime, had figured out something was wrong. He alighted at the doorway and peered inside. The distraught mother sprang up and knocked him from his perch, whereupon he began circling and diving, as if enticing her as he would later lure the young into their first flight. Mom tried frantically to follow him, jamming one wing and then the other against the sides of the opening, pecking at the edge of the hole, wriggling and writhing with all her tiny might. She pressed her belly against the door, her feet extended through it, little claws grasping at the wood. Exhausted and panting from exertion, again she subsided into the dark interior.

The humanitarian in me was urging intervention at this point. I had been watching her struggle for 45 minutes or more. But any birder knows that it is best to let Nature take its course, and had I given way, I might well have doomed a clutch of three, four or five baby swallows to death. “Besides,” I rationalized in my simple-minded way, “Pooh got thinner and then he got unstuck.”

Didja ever see one of those sweat bath boxes in the cartoons where nothing but the character’s towelled head sticks up? They were once all the rage for losing weight. Whether or not getting herself all in a lather made her shed a necessary gram of fat, Mother’s next attempt popped her out the door like a cork from a bottle of bubbly. Dad flew ‘round her once or twice to assess the damage, dismissed the whole affair as nonsense, entered the nest and started his shift.

For a few days, I kept a vigilant eye on the swallow house. Both parents entered and exited, albeit with some interesting contortions on Mother’s part, and a few weeks later, all four nestlings fledged. The story had a happy ending, and there won’t be any dod-rotted starlings going through that doorway to imperil domestic bliss!

My personal calendar isn’t divided into twelve nearly equal sections like the one you probably use, but that’s to be expected since I live in a different world. Having passed through the interminable “month” of Long Nights, we enjoyed briefly Pussywillows, and now come into the days of Skunk Cabbage. It is now that the year truly begins.

I start watching for the first yellow head some time in early March. It never appears until after the 15th, but I don’t want to miss it, oh no! That would be tantamount to sacrilege, or at the very least, second cousin to sleeping through the fireworks and the ball dropping in Times Square. I tend to drive into town a bit oftener than usual during this period, and if fishing doesn’t take me that direction, there will be some other cause for a trip over the Divide. That was how I discovered time zones.

Between here and the grocery store, several bogs and runnels are fair gardens of skunk cabbage in their season, but none holds a candle to the top of the Divide. It’s an unlikely spot for this plant of marsh and fen, yet it grows profusely beside the road for several miles. I’m certain that poor drainage can be thanked, as even convex land masses sport massive groupings, and the soggy ditches inhibit trespass by inspired photographers unless they’re wearing waders. It is there that I can celebrate early, and then go to bed and get a good night’s sleep. You see, the Divide is on Hill Time, and the road into town is on Lowland Time, and they’re about a week apart.

I no longer observe this change of season as I once did by bringing a clipped spathe indoors and plunging its stem into a glass of water heavily laced with baking soda to reduce its pungent odor to a tolerable level. I’ve grown too environmentally conscious for that. I am content to roll the car window down and drive slowly past. The scent or the season lingers only for its moment, no longer than its due, and appropriate homage has been paid.

Among the creatures in my care is an aged blue betta named Mr. Fish. Bettas have an average life expectancy of two years, although some may live as long as six, and Mr. Fish is three and counting. His fins are tattered, his eyes are bulgy, and his color is less than vibrant. He’s not an active fish, not like Lotus and Loomis in the other tank who dart around and occasionally assume threatening poses at each other through the plexiglass divider. He eats well, but he’s lethargic.

Recently, the Bio-Wheel filter in his tank began malfunctioning. A replacement is not available, and repair is not possible since the device is a sealed unit. However, bettas don’t require filtered water and in nature, live in some pretty murky soup. Nevertheless, Mr. Fish has always had filtered water, and in the days of his youth, he appeared to profit from it. In fact, since the filter filed its walking papers, poor Mr. Fish has seemed less happy than before.

Given the option of spending around twenty bucks for a new tank and filter combo just to keep a three-dollar fish happy, you would think that I, a heartless fisherman, should be able to flip Mr. Fish down the bog or send him to the guillotine. Yeah, right.

Today, I cleaned the aquariums, a monthly task. I could have put Mr. Fish into a simple bowl and have resigned myself to changing his water twice a week, but again, that sounds like more work than it’s worth. The filter is running feebly now, processing a mere trickle of water, and the last time I looked, Mr. Fish had gone to investigate. It seems to have perked him up a bit, poor old guy.

This one causes me great consternation. Let me quote directly from Webster’s Third two definitions for the same word which are at odds with each other.

The word under discussion is “sanction.” As a noun, it means “a restrictive measure used to punish a specific action or to prevent some future activity.” When employed as a verb, it is “to establish, maintain, encourage, or permit usually by some authoritative approval or consent.”

If your government has just sanctioned something, do you have any idea what action they have taken? If, for example, the Game Department has “sanctioned” taking salmon out of season, what consequence can you expect when the Fish Cop pops out from behind the bush and asks you how they’re biting?

Don’t get any ideas. I have not been poaching fish. In my book, that practice is thoroughly sanctioned. Do you know whether I approve of it or disapprove? I think not, and I take pride in being able to make myself abundantly clear in English; pedantic, perhaps, but clear upon analysis.

Language is, after all, a tool or a toy, depending on the mood and moment. You can wrench it tight, drive verbal spikes with its blunt end or its sharp one, screw down particulars, or grease communication with it. You can puzzle with it, bounce it through hoops, put a spin on it and send it caroming off the boards. It is both fun and functional, and like both toys and tools, it does occasionally break if misused.

Deep in the guts of the machine of English, I hear a squeaky spring. It goes “ssssaaaaanggggg-chun!” when you turn the wheel that certain way, so before it busts entirely, I think I’ll just avoid it.

“I got a yellow egg and lemon twist on. Whadda you got?”

There is a pause. “That brown stuff, I think.” It has been twenty minutes since Sande re-baited. “Yeah, and a worm.” His eyes follow the gold line from the tip of his motionless rod to the point where it enters the water. A drifted thread of dry grass is bent around the monofilament.

I shift uncomfortably on the folding canvas chair, then stand up and pace three feet to the tree and lean up against it. I’m watching a duck in the center of the lake as it nods its head repeatedly, searching just beneath the surface for a tidbit. My rod tip points right of Sande’s and the yellow mono slants away into a greater distance, beyond the float of debris. A slight movement puts me at the ready as the slack is drawn out of the line, but it’s only the wind and soon both breeze and fisherman relax.

Sande goes back to the truck and pours himself a cup of coffee, rummages among the jars of Power Bait in his canvas bag until he finds orange rubber eggs. He breaks one off the chain and lays it on the tailgate, has a swig of java, then nonchalantly walks to the shore, reels in. The grass catches in the terminal eye of the rod. He picks it off and flicks it into the water. Returning to the truck, he props the pole against the side, takes another drink of brew, and again mills through the canvas creel. I see glitter in the jar; he’s selected rainbow.

I’ve tried that, but see no sense in telling him. We’ve each tried multiple combinations of squishy ordnance from our armouries with the same degree of success, which is to say, “a score of zero.” But the formula might work now, beneath the lengthening shadows of afternoon. I leave my tree and resume vigil in the canvas seat. Sande casts out, unintentionally crossing my line. I leave this transgression unmentioned.

Fifteen minutes elapse in silence, and then I am moved to inquire, “ Wha’d ya put on this time?” although I know the answer.

“Orange egg and rainbow,” he replies.

The wind rises as the clouds march up from the southwest, advance scouts for tomorrow’s rain. Ripples crease the lake. A female eagle passes low above the water, turns a tight 180, then veers off into the stand of alders on the far side. I lose sight of her, brown on russet-grey, only to have my meandering eyes drawn to a dark patch that has suddenly lifted a long neck above the tan grass.

Sande is feeling the chill, and retrieves his black stocking cap from the cab of the truck, pulling it firmly down over his ears. I button up my plaid wool shirt and wonder why I let a sunny March morning blind me to its potential afternoon. I have no jacket. On pretext of changing bait, I shanghai Sande’s spare. It’s his “good” one. I have to be careful not to wipe Power Bait on the hem. Now, insulated against the wind, I lean up against the tree again. My rod has not dipped. Sande’s line has more grass wound around it.

He asks me, “What did you put on this time?”

“Chartreuse,” I reply. “And a chartreuse egg.”

We’re skunked and we know it, but we’re not ready to turn in our time cards, not yet. “You’re going all chartreuse, are you?” he says. I nod. His eyes follow his line out to the wisp of grass, now bouncing on wind-ripples as I settle myself on the canvas chair and watch a crow fly down the lake.

Some days, it’s about friendship, and not about fish at all.

Katy’s memorial was today, and quietly among the Christians, I celebrated her life and gave her farewell.

Ritual, I believe, is critical to human identity, although we are not the only creatures to honour our dead. Elephants have been documented to do so, as have several species of corvidae, notably ravens. Grieving for a spouse has been repeatedly verified as occurring among monogamous corvids. Is this because these species have reached a certain point in their social evolution? Are grief and mourning biological functions? It might trouble you to face that proposition, but I firmly believe it is so.

Consider tears. Sande is a weeper, as am I. We break up at movies, or at emotional passages in books, at weddings or funerals, or over a friend’s lost goldfish. We can’t help it. We try to hold it in the backs of our respective throats, but sooner or later, it rises up with the zest of a breakfast of cold pizza. Why? Well, because that sob we’re trying so hard to stifle is a form of biological release. It’s an emotional itch that needs scratching, a psychological sneeze. Once it’s out, we feel better for it, and maybe it ends there on a single sniffle…or maybe not.

Today, I wept silently through Katy’s service, feeling the fool and unable to stop. I hardly knew her. She was Sande’s wife’s sister and husband of a man with whom I pick mushrooms once a year, and who thoughtfully prunes my grape. My grief was disproportionate to my relationship with Katy, but nonetheless genuine, and serving certain purpose. Something within me wanted out, and when the gate opened, it took flight on Raven’s wings.