I’ve never had a cat who liked to lie on her back as much as Frassy does. It’s not just in hot weather – she does this no matter the temperature in the house.
Ballet?
Calisthenics?
When she also turns her head upside down, it reminds me of how much I enjoyed that as a child – lying on my back looking at the ceiling, pretending it was the floor, picturing myself walking around on it, stepping up over the doorways.
But what’s in Frassy’s mind when she looks at the world this way?
I put words in her mouth all the time, but my thoughts are unlikely to be hers. It’s hard enough to know what another human being is thinking – and yet we imagine we know the thoughts of our pets.
We especially imagine we know what our relationship to them is, what we mean to them, when all we can know is what they mean to us.
Frassy came up on my lap as I was writing this, and helped out. Or so I like to say.
August is summer with a difference. Hours of daylight are still plentiful, but you can feel them drawing down, heading toward the equinox. No more strolling in the garden at ten p.m.; nights are cooler; but the harvest is rolling in. Tomatoes are coming into their own, and the squash – oh, the squash. I plant yellow crooknecks instead of zucchini so I have a chance to find them before they get as big as doorstops. Even so, they seem to have an amazing ability to be four inches long one day and twelve inches the next. I would be tempted to say they’re called squash because they squash anything else trying to grow near them, but being a wordsmith, of course I looked that up. One kind of squash comes from “quash,” a Middle English word now used chiefly for subpoenas, and the other from “asquutasquash,” from the Narragansett. It sounds like the Narragansett people taught the pilgrims how to eat some kind of squash they’d never seen before.
The Narragansetts would also have had blueberries, a native North American fruit. I came across an argument online about whether the Indians called them “starberries,” but was unable to delve into it because AI kept changing “starberries” to “strawberries.” Thanks, but I’m well aware that no one calls blueberries strawberries.
The flowers that produce seeds instead of fruit are also hard at work generating harvest. The seed pods of my California poppies are so elegant, I have sometimes tried to preserve them. They’d look lovely in a dried flower arrangement but they always burst open, their goal achieved despite my desires.
My zinnias produce new flowers and ripe seedheads in equal numbers right up till frost. They’re a mainstay of my bouquets, so I was disturbed one morning to find the petals munched off of a few of them. I spent some time searching carefully for miscreant bugs in need of control, but none appeared. A bit later, looking out the kitchen window, I laughed to see the riddle resolved: it was a goldfinch, ripping seeds out of the still-petalled seedheads. The petals fell to the deck, where they soon turned an inconspicuous brown. The stems bent over when he landed on them, but not so as to interfere with his snack. The really funny thing was that I was looking right at him thinking he was a bright yellow Cut and Come Again zinnia blowing slightly in the breeze, until he moved enough to show the black stripe on his wing. He was gone before I could get a photo of him at it.
All day I tried to write a blog post about my beautiful summer flowers, but all I can think about is the little girls swept away in the Texas floods. Summer was beautiful for them, too, swimming and canoeing, supported by the river and trusting in the goodness of life as children do. They slept, and the world changed. They woke to thunder, and the lurch of a power they never knew the river had.
Those sweet, small lives. Not only the devastated families whose daughters were lost, but also those girls who survived, now have this experience engraved on their hearts. All the rest of us, no matter our politics or attitudes toward climate disasters, have hearts rent by their pain right now.
Meanwhile in Texas, they will face the question of blame. Blame is useful if, instead of poisoning regret and generating revenge, it is targeted toward solutions to the problems that fed the disaster in the first place. To have a child, the saying goes, is to have your heart walking around outside your body. All those girls, beautiful as summer flowers, leave many empty spaces behind them, and only memories to fill them in. I hope the families of Camp Mystic can find comfort and solace in remembrance.
A few years ago I was given a seed packet of milkweed – the only host plant for monarch butterflies – to sow in the yard. A random milkweed plant would show up in my yard from time to time but they never established themselves, so I assumed I had poor milkweed habitat and forgot about the packet. Then, cleaning out a drawer in February, voila, the milkweed seeds reappeared. I doubted they were viable at that point, but I read on the envelope that they could be tossed out onto the snow in winter. So I did that.
Turns out the seed was plenty viable and the plants, now flourishing in full flower, are barging in on the hydrangeas, the chamomile, the sage, and even the pineapple mint and garlic chives.
So, another lesson from the garden. Never underestimate the ability of life to overcome adversity, no matter how unfavorable the outlook or how dim the expectations. Here’s my milkweed standing up for the success of the beleaguered monarch butterflies. The odds don’t look great for butterflies right now, but the milkweed is voting for them. You go, milkweed.
People are complicated, come from different backgrounds, and have different experiences, so there are many things to disagree about. Argument is a perfectly legitimate form of human communication. Violence is not, yet we seem to go there all the time. There are more sad news stories today than I can, or want to, recount. I went to the garden for solace and there I found the bleeding hearts still blooming. Bleeding hearts came to North America from China, where they’re called purse peonies. Different ways of looking at things.
I still have a few regular peonies, too. Earlier this month the large and beautiful peony garden in Ann Arbor was assaulted, hundreds of its innocent flowers cut off and thrown to the ground. Flyers left behind announced this as a political act but it looked like spite. Did someone really expect the fallen flowers would bring allies to their cause?
The garden is much better at forming alliances. Here’s a bumblebee visiting my baptisia, where she will use her weight to open the flower, something smaller bees can’t do. Baptisia and bumblebees have worked out a deal. No manifestos were created, no weapons fired, the bee presumably her own ambassador.
The milkweed, still in bud, has a deal with monarch butterflies. When it blooms they’ll pollinate it, and in return its leaves will supply munching monarch caterpillars with a poison that keeps predators away, an alliance of mutual benefit. Poison can be considered a weapon, but for the monarch the point is deterrence. There is no wisdom in the mutually assured destruction of having your predator die after it eats you.
There’s certainly struggle in the garden. The ferns have moved in so far onto the path through the woods, I’m going to have to pull some out. But when I do I’ll transplant them to the front yard, under the pine trees. I expect they will thrive in the mulchy shade there, where the grass is unhappy. Plants, like people, have different needs, sometimes hard to figure out. The least we can do is try.
When I moved to Michigan I learned a new term — shoulder season. This being Ann Arbor and Brady Hoke’s football team being where it was then, I thought it meant crying on someone’s shoulder between sports seasons. I was fond of Brady Hoke and hoped he’d do better, because he said he’d walk to get to Michigan and that was how I felt about it. But now here I was, and as winter slid into a spring too warm for sweaters and too cold for shorts, the meaning of the term came clear to me: not on the main path; sloping off from one place to another; like the shoulder of a road. Transition.
Here are my red poinsettias, out enjoying the sunlight that will slowly turn them green, a color they will keep until I bring them inside come fall, and daylight lessens, and they turn red again.
Here are violets in strong profusion, while morning glories in pots to either side are barely sprouting. The violets will wither in the coming heat, but the morning glories will move in and take over.
Here are yellow alliums and purple chives in bloom, while behind them milkweed has a long way to go before it flowers and feeds the monarch butterflies.
And here are Siberian iris spearing their way into a showy blue drift under the ornamental pear tree, whose flowers are already turning into fruit the deer will eat in August. Deer can be total pests but it’s strangely comforting that, despite my efforts at deterrence, they come back, resilient in the face of adversity. Fight the good fight, deer. I appreciate that more today than I ever have.
I was scratching Frassy behind her ears today, when it occurred to me to wonder how it is that people have pets. Dogs may have been adopted as hunting helpers and cats for rodent control, following our habit of bribing wild creatures to live alongside us by feeding them in exchange for milk, wool, eggs, or service. But today people who don’t hunt and have never seen a mouse still have dogs and cats in their homes. And what about gerbils, hamsters, parakeets – all manner of animate beings with no useful task to perform for us.
How did this happen? I see domestication as something carried out by little girls, about seven to ten years old. Girls this age fall in love with baby animals, no matter how wild, and want to bring them home. Suppose the hunt has been successful, and while the grown-ups are busy drying meat and stretching hides, a little calf stands bleating at the edge of the firelight. Oh look, says Small Daughter, he’s so cute, can I keep him, please? Negotiations ensue, promises of care-taking are extracted, and the calf comes along home. The cultural attitude Small Daughter has to deal with today – maybe with an injured bird or abandoned baby squirrel – is different from what it was in a hunting camp 12,000 years ago, but it’s likely the emotional pull she feels from a small, vulnerable creature is the same, as much as our two legs, two arms, and large brains are the same. We’re built that way.
The remains of dogs and cats have been found in human graves from 12,000 years ago, valued and honored perhaps for their usefulness, perhaps for their companionship. We’re made for inter-relationships – we’ll even reach across species for them – we have pets because we have a need for interdependence. Frassy is very rewarding when I scratch behind her ears, leaning into it with the appearance of gratitude, and purring. Humans are more complex, harder to figure out, and most of us are not trying very hard right now. Emotional investment in our pets is lovely, but maybe we could look harder for things to value and honor in each other.
For a plant with so many advantages, the dandelion gets little respect. Its bright yellow flowers, among the first in spring, are models of classic flower structure, and can be made into wine. The young leaves are the first salad green in my spring yard and cook up nicely with a little bacon and maple syrup, just like other sturdy greens.
The flowers can be left to ripen into puffballs for children – or me – to blow on, making wishes that scatter in the wind. True, this only helps the dandelion barge into places that belong to other plants, but its name, “dent de lion” – lion’s tooth – suits a bold, adventuresome nature.
But it’s this adventuresome nature that has consigned the dandelion to the category of Weeds. When I was growing up, having dandelions in your lawn was considered antisocial. The cure, spraying with chemicals, is not in such good repute today. Will dandelions escape their weedly reputation?
It takes more time and attention than we often have, to see a thing outside its assigned category, to stop and consider every leaf and petal in front of you instead of hacking everything with one hoe. I used to pull my dandelions. This year I’m letting them be.
Faithful to the season, the hellebores lifted themselves out of the dirt in time to wave hello to lent. I should have been paying closer attention, because I missed getting my paczki this year – a special Polish pastry available only at Mardi Gras. Not, of course, called Mardi Gras in Polish, but I have enough trouble spelling paczki (it’s pronounced “punchkey”) to venture another Polish word. Every year the hellebore tribe increases in my yard; they seem especially ruffly this year.
The tribe of the deer increased this year, too. Over the winter we had a group of eight, then a group of twelve, but now they’ve merged into a group of twenty, more than I’ve ever seen at once on my lawn. It’s odd, because normally the herds break into smaller units come spring. Maybe the deer equivalent of paczki is coming up in through the grass.
Another spring surprise for me was this orchid, a gift from a friend last year, reblooming. I’ve been given orchids before, enjoyed them while they bloomed, and then watched them wither and die. My previous experience with orchids was as corsages, or seeing them in California where they grew outdoors. So I assumed a windowsill was not great orchid habitat, yet here she is, all aglow.
Behind her, in brighter light, is another outdoor California plant, a bougainvillea, which has come back from a near-death experience. It had dwindled to a total of four leaves before I realized the gnats in the room were a sign of fungus in its soil. I had a three-pronged attack for this, so I’m not sure which part worked. First I mixed hydrogen peroxide into a pitcher of water and soaked the soil with it, as a fungus killer. Then I poked holes in the soil nearest the sad bare branches and shook in some rooting powder, to try to regenerate healthy roots. Then I painted the four stalwart leaves with Miracle-gro, a foliar feeder, to help it out until its roots recovered. It worked! Yay!
Meanwhile, it’s been fun getting to know our new cat. Frassy has found all Zerlina’s old favorite spots, and invented a few of her own. Zerlina was afraid of sticks, or anything sticklike, from which we guessed she had once been abused with them. Frassy seems to be trauma-free. She’s especially fond of Doug. Here he is playing with her with a feather toy on a stick. She’s already bitten through the string once – see the knot where I tied it back together? She’s also ferocious with her two toy mice. If we do really have a mouse in the house, I hope we won’t for long.
I was all set to write a blog post for today about snowdrops, daffodils, tornado warnings, and other signs of spring. Then I got a call from the Humane Society that the cat Doug and I saw there last week was ready for adoption. They had picked her up as a stray, but now the requisite time had passed for anyone else to claim her. She was ours.
It’s been eight months since our wonderful Zerlina died, and at first I was too full of memories of her to accommodate another cat. But eventually I shifted from thinking I saw her everywhere from the corner of my eye, to realizing all those spaces were empty and needed a cat to fill them. Then we found signs of a mouse in the kitchen, and that sealed the deal.
So we brought her home. First thing in the door I showed her the litter box – cats like to know where it is – and then watched for what she’d do next. I had a few possible opera names picked out for her, depending on what I could learn of her personality. Some cats will hide; some will wail; some will try to run out the door. Our tabby girl was bold, adventurous, and affectionate. She especially liked to have Doug rub her head, and she did a walk-through of every room in the house. I named her Frasquita, after the gypsy girl who was Carmen’s fun-loving but more reasonable friend. Doug calls her Frassy.
So this is the story of a new beginning, after all – a new season, a new cat. She’s sleeping in Doug’s lap right now. They make a nice double portrait of what a good idea it is to love again.
Robin Richstone 