Saturday, October 31, 2009

Red, White, and Earl

A never ending source of both amusement and consternation are the three roosters who came to... well, roost... with us this year. For reasons that were never fully clear to me, my husband brought home three roosters from the Mayor's (see post: The Mayor of Mark Haley) house sometime in the spring. They're handsome, cocky fellows.(Boy, I'm on a roll today...) One is a Road Island, dubbed "Red," one might be a Delaware, "White." And then there's "Earl," who might either be a Maran, or a Plymouth Rock. I am almost more clever than I can handle: Earl is actually a mixture of black and white feathers but from a distance, he appears gray. Get it? At any rate, I think they were supposed to eat the ticks in our yard, and maybe they do. But mostly, they strut their stuff around the yard, crow under our windows at ungodly hours, poop all over the patio, and steal the other animals' food. I have a love/hate relationship with these birds. I love to look at them, but most days, I find myself hoping they get run over by one of the speeding trucks that seem to overpopulate our road.

Since it is the eve of Halloween, I'll dedicate the rest of this post to the strange interaction between our roosters and our jack-o-lanterns. Kid number one and I went to Walmart last week, after three solid weeks of being pestered at every grocery store to buy pumpkins, and bought our carvers. There had to be a big "daddy" pumpkin, a fat "mommy" pumpkin, a little "kid-sized" pumpkin, and a "baby" pumpkin. We carved the first two on Monday and Tuesday nights this week. Kid wanted the daddy pumpkin to be a mad face and the mommy one to be a sad face. Psychology? So they were gutted, carved, lit, and set out in accordance with his wishes. The next morning, when I went out to set the garbage out by the road, I witnessed the carnage. The mommy pumpkin had been viciously pecked around it's forelock, teardrop, nose, mouth, and one eye. At first, I was inclined to be annoyed, but the more I looked at it, the more Halloween-appropriate it seemed. So I chalked it up to chicken art.

But why did the rooster peck the mommy pumpkin so badly, but only give the daddy pumpkin one good shot below one eye? Is even the spirit of daddy so intimidating?

Postscript: Since the writing of this post, Earl has gone to the great corn patch in the sky. And we still don't know exactly why the chicken crossed the road, but he did not get to the other side.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Mr. Sullivan

We all have certain things our minds just won't do. For example, I cannot, under any circumstances, spell "scene" and "screen" right without looking them up first. (If they're spelled right it's because I looked them up.) I also can't be sure of my own mother's birthday between two possible dates. And, for some reason, I can't remember Mr. Sullivan's name most of the time.

Marvin Sullivan is one of the constellations of my local system. He's a board member of the library where I work, a member of the church I go to, a near-neighbor. He knows my kids and my husband. He used to be an English teacher in the local school system before he retired, and has written a book about the county. He can be seen most days driving around town in a carriage drawn by one of his two horses. Just last week, I saw him driving up Mark Haley Rd in his little cart pulled behind his skittish rose-gray gelding. In the cart with his was "Aussie," a little dog whom I guess to be part Aussie Cattle Dog. "Your dog and your horse match," I told him, and he laughed. The man is that familiar, and yet somehow, half the times that I see him, my addled brain wants to call him, "August Something-or-other." What is that about?

I'm taking home Marvin's book tonight. Back Yonder, it's called. I'll let you know...

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Fall Has Fell

Fall has fallen with a vengeance here in the hill country. Temperatures, mild all summer, came slamming down to the forties seemingly over night. Last night, I lit the wood burning stove for the second time and it is only mid-October. When I walked out the door on Thursday morning, I thought I'd been worm-holed to somewhere outside of Dublin, Ireland. The temperature was a balmy forty-two and a steady drizzle was falling. Why is it like that on the days I can't just go back to bed?

Despite the rains that have been with us all summer long (why is it perfect garden weather all summer the one summer when I can't work in a garden because I have a new baby?) and are continuing unseasonably into the Autumn, Kentucky is a beautiful as ever. The trees are beginning to turn, so that each hill is a palette of greens, yellows, oranges, and russets, with touches of bright candied cherry red. The unfortunately named "Swamp" Maples are wonderful for this cherry red shade, many of them bragging green, yellow, and red leaves all at once.

But the best thing about Fall this year is that my roosters seem to hate it. There's nothing quite so fulfilling to my day as stepping out the door into early morning's cold temperatures to be eyed resentfully by three pairs of beady little rooster eyes. They hate me because I found them roosting on my potting bench a few nights back and took a broom to them. After I hit a few fowl balls, they decided maybe they better stick to their coop, where they are freezing their feathered butts off. Sooner or later, I'll take pity on them and fit up their heat lamp, I suppose, but for now I just superimpose their scowling images over the fall foliage background in my mind's eye and laugh all the way to work.

Friday, October 09, 2009

Kentucky Wool Festival

Last weekend was the Kentucky Wool Festival, which takes place just outside of Falmouth at the fairgrounds by Kincaid Lake State Park. I have a certain prejudice against the Wool Fest, because they have the same vendors year after year and no one new can get a foot in the door except by shear (hahaha) dumb luck, but we go each year nonetheless. Why pass up an opportunity to eat funnel cakes and gyros and pay one dollar for a 12 ounce can of soda?

There's always a sheep shearing demonstration, a herd-dog demonstration, farm animals you can pet (although this is not recommended with the prize turkey who walks around puffed up and menacing all weekend and and goes home at the end of it to have a stroke), tractors you can pet, a two-stroke engine-powered corn meal grinder, a sorghum booth, a "wool" tent, homemade lye soap, a blacksmith... Any festivalish thing you can think of, except for a midway, it has. But this year's noteworthy experience was the butterfly vendor.

The butterfly vendor had all kinds and colors of butterflies in glass shadowbox frames, just as you might expect. They had single butterflies pinned behind glass, and herds or flocks pinned up together, and even bugs that, if I saw them on my wall, I would be tempted to try to kill with a baseball bat. But the thing I liked the most, and yet found myself the most disturbed by, were the earrings. Cut, laminated, and hung from french hooks were the wings of butterflies of every possible color.

As compelling as the colors were, and as unique as the concept seemed, I couldn't get past the idea that something as fragile and "innocent" as a butterfly had to die to make these. Of course, as my venerable mother pointed out, there is nothing innocent about a cabbage butterfly-- the little yellow ones that are everywhere eating the leaves of things you'd rather not have them eat-- so I consolled myself that the same must be true of other butterflies in their native habitats. Maybe, like fallen angels, butterflies are things of beauty that are evil to the core! So I wear my massacred butterfly earrings with pride. Long live the Wool Festival!

Thursday, October 01, 2009

The Holler Eats Cats

Now that I've got that taken care of-- not Arabic, but Hindi, by the way-- I can get on with what I was going to say.

The Mark Haley Holler eats cats. When we moved here, we had K'Tigu. she adopted us about a week after we moved in, announcing her presence from the darkness under the car and never looking back. And though she is long gone, chased off by a mongrel whose owner should've been shot along with him, I think she will always be my favorite of our feline interlopers. Maybe it's because I could tell she liked me. She would come and sit by me out on the porch steps, but she never wanted me to pet her. This is a good thing, since I'm allergic to cats.

After her came the sibling kittens, Bob and Nightcat. Bob was the last cat even mentioned in a blog and that was months ago. When they arrived, the kittens got to live in the laundry room for a while, one inky black shadow and one jaunty gray tiger, eventually to be ousted for pooping behind the washer and dryer. They made it just fine outside for a while. Bob became "Bob" when he lost his tail in a freak accident involving high winds and a heavy door, but he never was resentful. Bob was always a lover while his dear sister was a fighter/hider/hunter. Evidently, Nightcat decided to hunt a car tire one night, however. We found her in the morning, to put it mildly, much the worse for wear.

I never knew cats mourned, but for a couple of weeks after that, Bob was not himself. He searched for her all over, repeatedly sniffing the spot where we'd found her. He wandered around keening in the most distressing fashion. Maybe Bob just had a special soul, but it seemed he never quite got over the loss of his litter-mate. Some couple of months ago, Bob departed from us for what I suppose to be good. I like to think he shacked up with a girl cat somewhere and thinks of us fondly, but maybe he left because the three roosters (fodder for another blog) were eating all of his food. Wherever you are, Bob, may the road rise up to meet you and all that jazz.

Between losing Nightcat and losing Bob, we had two kitten friends that didn't last long. One was Noodle, named and given by a neighbor. He got stuck in a tree across the street in the underbrush where I couldn't get to him and might've become a snack for an owl. He was a rather small kittie. After him, there was a kitten so tiny it prompted my mother to look up dwarfism in cats. He/she never got a name, though I toyed with several. This kitten had the most astonishing fir: long, and black, but shot through with even longer pewter colored fir so that he looked like he'd stolen the coat off of a silverback gorilla. At eight plus weeks, little Pewter was no larger than my hand and he never got any bigger. But whether heartworms or genetic defects got him, the little one was not with us for more than a month, and that was one of the least fun things I've ever had to explain to a four year old.

So we were catless for a time, and thinking we ought to remain that way, until the night when, returning home from work, I almost ran over a friendly kitten. When I got out of the car to chase her away, the little one trotted up to me and said, in kitteneze, "You're mine now, sucker!" When we got her home and saw her in the light of day, this kitten was the spitting image of Bob. Charlie christened her "Daisy" and we like to think she was sent by her sire to take care of us.

Shortly after that, two gray-eyed, orange wildcats took up residence behind the library where I work. Rather than have them be run over, I lured them out with Chinese food (works every time...) and took them home. We didn't even have the chance to name them before one disappeared. The other, dubbed "Boots" by my husband is still skittish. How not, when the dog and the three stupid roosters think it is a sport to follow the poor fellow around looking hungry? We'll see how long these two last. Eight cats, three years, two survivors... we're a B-grade reality show in the making!

थे होलर एअट्स Cats

my title line appears in what i can only assume is arabic. why?
and perhaps more curious: why does arabic not have a word for "cats?"