Mostly Just Critters

My current desktop is a bunch of winter flowers with a big old round raindrop hanging on.

Last time, when I talked about my frozen back driveway, I thought I should have taken a photo of it for you, so this week, I’ve done that. This ice path is the back driveway and my usual route to the mailbox. 

Spitfire is the kitten in the picture but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple of more kittens in the weeds someplace. I don’t like them to follow me when I go to the mailbox because I don’t want them down near the road. Most days I try to sneak around the other side of the house, so I’m not passing in front of the cat room, and hope they won’t hear me and follow. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

See the ruts? We’re the last place just before the county line and the county uses our driveway to turn their equipment around in. Come spring, I’m sure Mike will take his tractor down and smooth it out a little. 

The last time Mike and I had gone out I saw the water over the beaver dam had frozen. 

“When we come back, Mike, slow down and let me get a picture of it, okay?”

“K,” he answered.

On the way home Mike remembered to stop so I could get my picture. I took about half a dozen shots, then we went on. 

“Peg, is that a beaver in front of the dam?” you ask

I don’t know. I never saw him until I was sorting photos for today’s blog. It’s just a rock or something, I thought. I went back to last weeks picture and it’s not in there, but the water was higher then too, so I still don’t know. Maybe the Kipp’s can tell us. There is a little bird on one of the branches in the foreground though.

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Do you see the look little Miss Itsy is giving me?

It’s taken Mike and me a couple of years to teach the girls to not beg at the table.

“Do they ever beg at the table?” you wonder.

Well, yeah, they still do sometimes. But mostly they know that when I’m done eating I’ll give them a treat; either something I’ve saved from my plate or some of their dog treats.

On this particular day Ginger was sitting at my feet, watching me as I ate and don’t you know that Itsy was watching from her bed on the couch. 

It tickled me.

Itsy is making sure I’m not giving Ginger anything. There have been times when I’ve tried to sneak Ginger a bite before I’ve finished eating, but Itsy always knows and it doesn’t take her long to get off the couch, then she expects a bite. 

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That cat!

That darn cat!

Yeah, Smudge.

We have discovered that we can’t break his will. Smudge continues to be a rebellious teen. He bites, won’t stay off the table and picks on everyone in the house. It got to where I was putting him in his kennel quite a lot for misbehaving and it just doesn’t seem fair to keep him in jail all the time — even though he doesn’t complain.

“Mike, we should put him outside. If he picks on the outside cats maybe they’ll teach him some manners.”

I guess Mike was getting fed up too. “Alright,” he reluctantly agreed. 

The next time Smudge misbehaved I put him out the door. 

Mike worries, in fact I would say that Mike is a worrywart…

If Macchiato is gone for too long or it’s getting dark outside, Mike wants him back in. And now it’s the same thing with Smudge. Mike worries about him. I’ve been trying to get Mike to stop worrying — worry is like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere. “I think you should stop worrying so much,” I’ve told Mike a million times. “If he gets hit by a car or killed by another animal, there’ll be more kittens next year,” I’ve said a dozen times.

I’d like to tell Mike that he should place his trust in God; that God loves us and doesn’t want us to carry around the burdens of this world on our shoulders. The Bible, God’s love letter to us, tells us so. 

Cast all your anxiety [worry] on Him because He cares for you - 1Peter 5:7 

And in Philippians 4:6 we are commanded: Do not be anxious [do not worry] about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

Second-guessing, partner of worry, is futile. You could guess all day long about what may or may not happen and in the end, you can’t anticipate everything. You simply have to make the best choice you can, with the information you have, and then live with the choice you made. 

After 21 years of telling him not to worry, he is starting to ease up a little — or in the very least, he is not expressing as much worry to me. 

Smudge loves it outside. He climbs trees and tussles and tumbles with Cleo, his liter mate, and his cousins Rascal, Spitfire and Feisty.

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I took Ginger and Itsy on a walkabout on Saturday afternoon. The temperature was a very mild 52 degrees. It was more like a day in March than a day in January! In the places where we had thick ice, there was still plenty of ice. We walked up the hill to the barn.

 Attached to the side of the barn is a smaller room with a separate entrance. I rolled the door back and looked inside. It was empty and mostly dry. 

Maybe Mike’ll let me have it to dry my wildflowers in, I thought. And I could keep the bones of my quill pig in here too.

  I pulled the door shut and as we walked on down toward the pond, I thought of Mike’s cousin. I’ll tell you what, Suzy is not only a kindred spirit but she is my hero too. She’s been collecting animal bones for a long time and has a whole shed devoted to them.

Not only that but she loves anything iron or metal. She’s used many of her finds to adorn a fence row and many more for landscaping in her yard. 

I love Suzy’s yard! It is so eclectic and I could spend hours there. 

But I’m off on a tangent. 

After going past the barn and down the hill I hear a bird at the edge of the pond, trilling an alarm. 

He had spotted the cats and was warning everyone else. I slowed my pace and tried to spot him but I couldn’t see him. Even when he took flight and disappeared down onto another branch, I still couldn’t spot him. I walked down to the edge of the pond hoping a different perspective would allow me to spot him but it didn’t. 

As I stood there listening to the bird and watching for the flit of a wing, Spitfire stepped in the water at the edge of the pond and eyed the ice. 

Surely he won’t go that far, I thought, but he did. He never took his eyes off the ice as he took another step and another step. The water came up to his chest. He is going for the ice! I was surprised.

Spitfire stepped up onto the ice…

and shook the water from his feet. 

And now my attention was on Spitfire as he explored the rotten ice. Would I go in after him if he fell through and got into trouble? I probably would, but man-o-man! would that water be cold! Not very deep though, maybe up to my knees. How deep the mud is, I have no idea. Luckily, I didn’t have to find out. 

I got Ginger and Itsy going again and we walked around to the other side of the pond. 

Splash!  

I turned around and saw Spitfire swimming for the bank. I don’t know if he fell in or jumped. He didn’t look like he was in trouble and I watched as he swam along the bank until he found a place where he could climb out, then climb out he did. He shook himself off and meowed at me.

“Hey! It wasn’t my fault,” I told him.

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One of our older females, Cali, is more accepting of me these days. She no longer runs out of the cat room when I enter and after a few weeks of that, I actually got to pet her this week. In this picture Cali is curled up snug and warm in an old piece of insulation. 

“Isn’t that bad for them?” you ask.

I’m such a dummy. I thought they took all the bad stuff out of insulation and the cats love the stuff. In all of the years that we’ve been gone they have trampled down and laid on all the insulation every place they could get to it. We had some old nasty insulation that we didn’t want to use in our house so I took it out to the cat room to seal up the air seeping in from under the door. 

And that’s where they would lay — on that insulation.

We came across some more insulation that was ruined, it had been rained on, so I dried it out and took it to the cat room and made beds for them. I just figured that since they liked it so much they could curl up in it and it would keep them warm on the coldest of days.

Then yesterday (Sunday) when I picked this photo to show you, I got to wondering about it and I Googled it. 

It is not good for the cats. Insulation has twenty to thirty percent recycled glass in it. When they lay in it, little fibers can break off and they ingest it as they groom themselves or worse, they could breathe it in.

I’m such a dummy.

Today, Monday, I cleaned it all out of the cat room; every bit of it. I never want to do anything to harm any critter — if I can help it. 

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This past week I worked on some wire work. I made a new style bracelet and I tried to end it so it wasn’t too girlish. I’m not happy with it.

I added beads to a ring.

And I made hearts. I thought it would be cute to add one to the loop at the of the first bracelet I’d made.

I flattened some of the hearts too and I really like the way the flattened copper looks so now that is rattling around in my head with all the other ideas I have working there.

My beautiful wedding ring— I’m allergic. It’s stainless steel and stainless contains nickel; nickel gives me a rash. So I only wear it when we go out. I’ve hammered a piece of copper and I wear that most of the time. It’ll work until we can afford to get me something else, 

Let’s call this one done.