Gross Encounters

          You can assume, from the title of this week’s letter blog that it’s not going to be everyone’s cup o’ sunshine. Not for the faint of heart. Totally skippable if you’re of the squeamish variety. And that’s totally fine. My feelings won’t be hurt if you want to opt out of reading this week’s jibber-jabber or just skim.

          Having said that, there really isn’t going to be anything that you haven’t seen before in past editions, and we’ll start with other news.

 

          The Do-It-Again Lubys strike again!

          “What now?” you ask.

          Now is the time of year when we start to think about winter and the snow.

          “Let’s put the snow thrower on the Kubota before it gets cold,” my handsome mountain man suggested.

          “Yeah. Let’s. I don’t want to be down there trying to figure it out when it’s cold.”

          The first thing we had to do was get the front mower off. That wasn’t too bad. We managed to figure out what had to be unhooked and what didn’t.

          “Do we leave the drive shaft?” I asked.

          “I think so,” Mike said.

          The mower was unhooked and the drive shift was dragging on the floor.

          “Doesn’t it have something to hang it on?” Mike asked.

          “I don’t see anything,” I replied.

          “You hold it up while I back up,” Mike said. “I’ll go slow.”

          I held it up out of the dirt on the floor and walked along as Mike backed up the Kubota. Honestly though, I wish he’d’ve gone a little faster. Being bent over, walking along, wasn’t the most comfortable position.

          The thrower has a quick-connect plate. It took us a loooooong time figuring out how to attach that. But once we had everything where it belonged, it went together rather easily.

          “Why didn’t you look in the book?” you ask.

          I did. Step one was easy. Put the control lever in the float position. Done. Step two is where the problems started. I could read the words just fine but didn’t understand what they meant.

          “Insert the flat bar notches of the quick hitch on the pins located under the lift arms of the tractor,” I read to Mike.

          I lowered the book, got down on my knees (being thankful Mike had put a piece of carpet down for us) and looked underneath. “What do they mean under the lift arms?” I asked.

          “I think it goes right here,” Mike said.

          Well, it didn’t. “There’s no way that’s going to go there. There’s a grease zerk in the way, plus it’s not centered.”

          It took us a long time getting it where it needed to go because the plate was heavy and it had to go on straight or it wouldn’t go at all. But we did finally get it on and bolted in place. That was when we realized that the drive shaft had to come off. The thrower had its own.

          “You stand on it while I drive it into the snow thrower,” Mike said.

          That was fine. I could do that. He moved forward slowly until the plate started into the quick connect slot on the thrower then I could take my foot off.

          Hooking up the couple of connections here didn’t take long. Mike got in the Kubota, started it up, pulled the lever back... and nothing.

          “It’s not lifting,” Mike said.

          “No, but I can hear the air hissing,” I told him.

          He turned off the tractor, got out, and we both got down to look for the connection we might’ve missed.

          “I think these have to be hooked up,” Mike said.

          Yeah. These. The lift arms.

          After working on it for hours, we didn’t have it in us to start over. It was hard work for us old people and we were tired.

          The next day, when we were fresh, we went down, unhooked the thrower, backed the tractor out, and figured out how to hook up the lift arms.

          That sounds easy, and it wasn’t really too bad, but there’s also blocks that have to be installed. Otherwise, the lift arms would send the chute of the thrower right through the windshield.

          We hooked up the lift arms, put the blocks on the outside, I, once again, held the plate down with my foot while Mike drove it into the receiver on the thrower.

          “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I said.

          Mike stopped immediately. “What?”

          I just gave him a look that said, “I’m not talking until you turn it off.” Mike’s hearing isn’t all that great and I do often have to repeat myself, even when there’s no engine noises to interfere.

          He turned it off and looked at me expectantly.

          “We don’t have the blocks on right. They fell over.” I was glad it happened before we hooked it up.

          Mike started the Kubota and backed it out of the thrower. We re-positioned the blocks to the inside and attached the thrower.

          “Now try it,” I said.

          Mike climbed back in the cab, started it, pulled the lever back, and the snow thrower came up off the floor.

          Yay! Mission accomplished.

          “The rest is on you,” I said. Two hydraulic hoses and the electrical wires were all that was left to do and he could hook those up without my help. I had things to do and drug my butt up to the house.

          “What else did you have to do?” you wanna know.

          I have two five-by-seven paintings I’m working on. They were supposed to be done a week ago, but as often happens, life got in the way.

          “Show us,” you say.

          Nope. I can’t. I don’t want to ruin the surprise for the two beautiful ladies who are going to be the recipients. You’ll just have to wait. I hope I can show you next time.

 

          We took the dogs and went shopping one day. It wasn’t too hot and they like to go with us. I took a few road pictures for you.

Crossing the beautiful Susquehanna.

          The fog still clung to the hillside in a few places.

          We had breakfast at McDonald’s and I don’t care what you say about that place. I like the breakfast burrito with hot picante sauce and Mike really likes the sausage egg McMuffin. Plus, it’s a third of the cost of breakfast in a restaurant.

         We swung by and checked out the progress on the new Braintrim Baptist church on our way home.

          A truck pulled in behind us. The guy got out and walked in.

His dog had a lot to say about that and Raini couldn’t resist adding her two cents.

I was surprised to see roses blooming. According to AI, it’s not uncommon but you won’t see any more after the first hard frost.

        

          This is a Clouded Sulphur, one of the last butterflies you’ll see for the year. Isn’t it great that dandelions still bloom to give these guys something to sip on?

          And that’s all the non-gross stuff I have for you this week except for a sunrise picture which I’m going to use as the closing photo for this week. So skip the whole way to the end if you don’t want to read about my grossly adventures. I’ll start with something rather mild. 

          I told you about Hatch’s wound last week. I really suspect that he was in a tussle with another tom. Despite the fact that it looked good the last time we were together, it had festered under the surface and burst. Cat bites do that. I’ve seen it before.

          I went out to feed him one morning and saw blood droplets on the floor. It didn’t take me long to ascertain what had happened, especially when I got a look at the side of Hatch’s head and it was dripping bloody pus.

          It continued to drain all that day and I saw a spot outside our patio door where he sat for a while.

          That wasn’t too bad, was it?

       

          It’s the rut here in Pennsylvania. The bucks are chasing the does all over the place!

          Someone’s trail cam caught a buck chasing a doe around the same shed five times! I saw it on the wildlife segment of the nightly news.

          “I was watching two bucks with huge racks fighting in the field,” my beautiful friend Annette told us in CDI class Thursday night. “While they were busy going at it, another smaller buck was over here making time with the ladies.”

          We all laughed.

          The conversation included something I didn’t know, but maybe you did.

          “A doe can be bred by more than one buck, and twin fawns can actually have different fathers,” Pastor said. He’s a hunter and a fisherman.

          “Cats are that way, too,” Jody said,

          Copilot says that there are several species that it’s common in. Besides deer and cats, it happens in dogs, bears, raccoons, and rodents. It’s even been known to happen to us humans occasionally, too, but it’s very rare.

          Fun fact: Our CDI class (Christian Discipleship Initiative) has shrunk to just three. All three of us were born in the same year. I call us the 59 Club.

          Anyway, like I said, the rut is on! Our roadsides are littered with the not-so-lucky.

          Poor Sugar.

          She’s one of our oldest cats and has been living in her condo, here in the house, for several years. At first it was just for the winters, then it became full-time. She seems happy and I’m happy to take care of her.

          “How old do you think she is?” I asked Miss Rosie.

          She thought about it. “I think she’s older than Flannel and Flannel is eighteen this year.”

          That didn’t sound right to me. Not that Flannel is eighteen, I don’t doubt that, but I don’t think Sugar is older.

          “I think Flannel was in the first litter that Mama had after we got her,” I told her. “And unless Sugar was in that litter, she’s younger.”

          I wasn’t trying to argue with Miss Rosie and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. But I was curious about how old she might be.

          I’ve been writing these weekly letter blogs for twenty-eight years. “I can check and see if I wrote about her,” I told Miss Rosie.

          I did that. I went out into the wreck of my old library and started pulling out notebook after notebook, flipping open the cover, and looking for the year 2008.

          When I found it, I went to August, and right where Miss Rosie said it was, I found a picture of Mama with four kittens. Tiny, Bessie, Casserole, and Flannel.

          Then I looked through the notebooks and found 2007, the year before Flannel was born. I flipped through letter after letter until I found a reference to Mama and Patches.

          We got Patches first, then the lady said she wanted to get rid of Mama, too, so we took her as well. Patches was in her very first litter and the last one that the lady needed to find a home for. That means Mama was likely a year old, or close to it, when she had her first litter. That makes her twenty. She’s still alive and that’s a testament to the great care Rosie and Lamar give her.

          I next went to 2009 and flipped through until I found a picture of Mama with a litter. I don’t think any of them look like sugar. I didn’t look any further. Sugar would be no older than sixteen, but could be a year or two younger.

          I have a written record of most every week of my life for the past twenty-eight years. The highs, the lows, the goods, bads, and uglies!

          Except 2008. There were only twenty-nine letters that year because I was working every other weekend.

          “I just love your letters,” my best old friend, Trish told me just today. “I look forward to them every week. The way you write makes me feel like I’m right there with you.”

          I’m sure I glowed under her praise. “Aww. Thank you!”

          “I think my favorite one was when you took your mom to the fair. I really felt like I was walking right there beside you. I mean, I could see it!” she exclaimed. “I could actually see it in my head!”

          “That was such a good day,” I said as the day flashed through my mind’s eye. “That’s the second time this week that I’ve been told that.”
          “What was the other time?” Trish wanted to know.

          “It was a gal at church. Her favorite one is when I wrote about Big Boy. I think she told me that she’s read it at least three times. And she’s the other one who said, ‘I feel like I’m there!’ I told her that her comments and compliments are the only payment I get for them.”

And that reminds me of something my handsome Uncle Clarence once told me, “I get a letter every week — and I don’t even have to pay for a subscription!” And he laughed.

          Love.

That's the reason these letters exist.

I started in 1998 because I loved my mother, Aunt Marie, and my sisters. Twenty-eight years later, I'm still writing them for the very same reason.

          And the catalyst — the thing that started it all — was Trish and the death of my father.

          I know some of you already know the story, but I have new readers. It’s not long, so I’ll retell it quickly here.

          When Pop died, I helped Momma clean up his stuff. That’s when I found letters that Trish had been writing to him. He saved them so I know they meant something to him. How happy it must’ve made him to get a letter in the mail, I thought. Then I was flooded with guilt. I’m his daughter, I should’ve been writing him letters!

          Life was busy and I buried my guilt under it.

It was a year later, maybe two, when I got a call. Momma had congestive heart failure. That scared me. Having a diagnosis with heart and failure in it sounded like a death sentence to me. This was in the early days of computers and internet and years before the internet became common in everyone’s house. The only way I could think to get information was to call the hospital, which I did. The very kind nurse I talked to told me she could live years with it. And she did. She didn’t leave us until 2018.

It wasn’t until Mike and I moved to Missouri and he bought me my very first and very own computer that I started to write letters to Momma. I wanted to give her a smile when she opened the mailbox, that there was something besides bills and junk mail in there, and that someone (me) loved her. Then, I wanted Momma and Aunt Marie and my sisters to come to Missouri, so I branched out with my letter writing in hopes of enticing them to visit. It worked, too!

And that’s how it started.

Sometimes, they were little more than I love you letters.

“You should’ve saved your stamp,” Momma fake-grumbled once. That was just her practical side showing and I know she liked getting them anyway.

I didn’t have an editor back then either so there were likely lots of mistakes. Momma didn’t care and seldom commented on them. Looking through the old books, reading a line here and there, I saw I wrote bear when I meant bare.

          LOL.

          It’s all good. It is what it is.

          Wow. What a tangent!

Back to Sugar and the reason I started wondering about her age in the first place.

I noticed, in the middle of the week, that Sugar was favoring her left paw. I thought maybe she caught it in the bars of her condo and just hurt it. Friday evening, when I was getting ready to scoop out her litter box, I checked her paw. Now, Sugar isn’t used to being handled. We do stop and pet her but for me to look at her paw I had to flip it over. She wasn’t having any of that and pulled her paw away, but not before I got a glimpse of something white.

“Mike, I think her claw is growing up into her paw. It’s too late to call the vet and now I feel bad I didn’t check it sooner.” I had all weekend to feel guilty.

By Monday morning I could see she had a fresh wound on the top of her paw. I thought maybe she was licking it to make it feel better.

I texted the vet early, before office hours.

“Bring her in at nine,” Dr. Lori said. “And you might have to do a day check-in.”

I knew it was going to cost us but I didn’t care. If she needs care, she needs care.

I took road pictures.

As we left the driveway, our doe with her two youngins was there. She might not be “our” doe, but she stays in the area and we’ve seen the babies since they were tiny.

Dr. Lori did a cursory exam of Sugar while I was there.

“She has a heart murmur. We’ll have to use an injectable sedative that won’t stress her heart,” she said to Cindy, the vet-tech helping her.

Dr. Lori looked in her mouth. “She only has one tooth left, and she’ll probably lose that one before long.”

Sugar had had enough and started biting.

“And she knows how to use it,” Dr. Lori said pulling her hand back.

Cindy scruffed Sugar (held her tightly by the back of the neck) and wrapped a towel around her so she couldn’t use her claws anymore. But she got so frantic that they couldn’t do anything else.

“Okay. We’ll finish the exam while she’s sedated,” Dr. Lori said.

At the end of the day, we learned it wasn't just one claw. Several of them had grown into her paw pads.

 They clipped her nails, cleaned the wounds, gave her a shot of a long-lasting antibiotic, a rabies shot, and a “recovery collar.”

“So she doesn’t lick at it,” Cindy said when she was giving me after-care instructions. “Her paw was packed with cat litter, so for the next ten days, while it’s healing, use a paper litter and not a clay one.”

“I have horse bedding,” I told her. “Can I use that?”

“Yep. That’ll work just fine.”

I bought it years ago and don’t even remember why I bought it. But I’m glad there’s still a good bit left. It doesn’t control odor and it breaks down from pellets to dust as she uses it so I have to dump and refresh every couple of days — but that’s okay. I can do it.

“You’ll have to get her a scratch pad or clip her claws or maybe both,” Cindy said.

I can get her a scratch pad and I might try clipping her nails if she tolerates Mike holding her while I do it. Otherwise, it’ll be more vet bills.

We weren't home with Sugar for very long before I took the "collar of shame," as some people call it, off her. She couldn't navigate in her condo and she couldn't eat or drink. But she seems to be leaving her paw alone.

 

I was getting dressed a couple of mornings ago. I had my pants on and was reaching in the drawer for a clean brassiere when Raini started retching. I don’t want to clean up vomit if I don’t have to. “OUTSIDE!” I commanded. She started for the door but had to stop and heave again. “OUTSIDE! GO!” and I followed behind to keep her moving. She stopped in the kitchen to heave again, but nothing came up. At least it would’ve been easier to clean up on the linoleum. “OUTSIDE!” I commanded one more time then she was through the pet door.

          I took my barefoot, half-naked self back to the bedroom to finish getting dressed.

          Later, I was standing outside, Bondi laying nearby, soaking up sunbeams, and I was talking to Miss Rosie when I see Raini out in the yard throwing up. I walked over but didn’t see anything in the leaf litter except liquid. After finishing my call I went back over for a closer look.

          Goodness-gracious-mercy-me! There were worms wiggling around in there! At least two of them! I have to tell you, intestinal parasites gross me out!

I got a paper towel and picked one up, along with a lot of dried leaves and grass. The worm was trying to get away by burrowing down in the leaves. Gingerly I picked him up and moved him to the edge of the paper towel. It disgusted me, but I couldn’t lose track of him and I need a picture to send to Dr. Lori. She could tell me what it was.

What am I going to do with it now? I wondered. Bleach! That’ll kill it!

I got the jug of bleach and bleached the area where Raini threw up. Then I set the paper towel down and poured bleach on that one, too. I didn’t want to take a chance anyone else would pick up a parasite. They really, really gross me out.

After dispatching the worms, and on the way back to the house, I spot a poor, dead, praying mantis. Parasites on the brain, I thought maybe a parasitic wasp or fly had laid an egg on him, it hatched and killed him. I went back and got the bleach-soaked paper towel, wrapped him in it, and put it in the garbage can.

I went in the house, downloaded the camera, sent one picture to Dr. Lori and asked AI about the praying mantis.

I got my answer from Copilot almost instantly.

“It looks more like physical damage than a parasite infestation,” AI said.

Now I feel guilty I might’ve stepped on him!

It took a little longer before I heard back from Dr. Lori. I bet she laughed when she saw my message. “It’s an earthworm. Raini must’ve picked it up when she was rooting around in the grass and it tickled her belly.”

I didn’t tell her I found it about five minutes after Raini vomited. The liquid had caused the worms to come to the surface. But this I did tell her. “I’m sorry. I panicked.”

LOL. Those poor earthworms.

We were watching TV when all of a sudden one of the cats started yowling.

“Who is that?” I asked Mike.

“I think it’s Sugar.”

It wasn’t long after that when we turned off the TV and I went to take the girls out. I turned on the kitchen light and there was Spitfire with his catch.

“It was Spitfire!” I yelled into the other room at Mike. “He wanted us to come see what he got!”

The girls and I went outside and when we came back in, Spitfire had eaten the front half. Raini helped herself to the back half.

“Maybe that’s why she threw up in the morning,” you say.

That’s what I wondered, too. I checked the date stamp on my pictures and Raini was sick the day before Spitfire’s catch.

Two days later, I wake up to a patch of red on the kitchen floor. I thought one of the cats puked and Raini cleaned it up. The red I attributed to the dye in the cat food. But it wasn’t. That wasn’t a piece of cat food left behind. It was a part Spitfire doesn’t like. Stomach? Gall bladder? Liver? I don’t know but I am proud of him. He’s a good hunter.

 

Let’s call this one done!