You better think

Today’s earworm is for those old skeletal White men (also looking at you, Amy Coney Barrett, Marsha Blackburn and Susan Collins, you gormless tools) who think half the population are going to go gently into that second-class night of the 1950s.

 

Just a salad, please

One critter I have not recently seen in my back yard is the brown bunny I caught on camera last year. It would certainly make sense if BB wanted to chow down on bird seed, rather than Foxy, but I’ve seen no signs of that.

However, I have spotted him around the cluster.

He was lunching a while ago on one of my neighbor’s lily stems.

I probably should have intervened, but when I came across him, he had already bent the stalk, so I reckoned the damage was done. This is the aftermath:

At least he cleaned his plate.

 

 

Rounded diet

Okay, I confess—I frequently toss bits of food that may be unappetizing to me out on the patio; almost every time, it’s gone by the next morning.

I’m talking crusts of Gruyere or Romano or really old scraps of mozzarella and the ricotta at the bottom of the little carton that’s gone kind of pinkish. Birds and squirrels ignore them, but someone must like them because they disappear overnight. (And, yes—the little plastic tubs are gone, so whoever it is takes them away to clean out at leisure. I keep picturing some little den with eight or ten Wegman’s ricotta containers, like family heirloom China.)

Same goes for cupcake papers—I fling them out at dusk and they’re gone by dawn. And salmon skins. And the occasional lamb chop bone. (I don’t put out chicken bones, because I don’t want to be responsible for someone getting throat or mouth splinters.)

For the longest time, I didn’t know who was dining Chez Bas Bleu; as you know, I’ve been visited by a skunk, a fox, racoons and an opossum (no pix/vid). Whoever it was, was bold and fast—some evenings I’d chuck out the bone, skin, cheese or paper and ten or 15 minutes later it would be gone, notwithstanding the fact that I’d been sitting in the lighted livingroom not six feet from the patio door. My money was on the trash pandas, but turns out I’d have lost that money. Because one night I heard a fox’s cry nearby, turned on the outside light and discovered Foxy chowing down on the lamb chop bone.

(The next night—and I swear I am not making this up—I heard that cry around midnight, right outside my window, waking me up; I told him, “Dude—this is not the International House of Lamb Chop Bones. You’re not getting them every night.”)

Well, since then, I’ve occasionally seen him making the rounds in the afternoon, having a sniff and passing through. The cheese rinds, salmon skins, ricotta cartons and cupcake papers continue to disappear, but I don’t see him in the act.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I’d tossed out some Fine Tunes bird seed just before I sat down to my own dinner, and blow me if Foxy didn’t come round and start Hoovering up the seed.

No way, you say?

Way.

Because I have video.

There is nothing on that patio but bird seed.

We are living in strange times, folks. Strange times.

 

 

 

Expanding beauty

When I was putting together yesterday’s post about cultivating beauty around me, I almost added this photo, but didn’t because it wasn’t “starry”.

But if you only look for the obviously, jump-out-and-smack-you-upside-the-head beauty, I think you’re going to miss out on a lot. I try to permit myself to expand on the notion of beauty, even to patterns on asphalt.

Honestly, I don't think you can too much of it in your life.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: seeing stars

I don’t recall how I came across Patrick Skinner on Twitter, but I’m grateful that I did. He’s had a varied career—including stints in the Coast Guard, the CIA and the US Capitol Police; currently he’s a detective with the Savannah police department, his hometown.

Pretty sure I started following because of the animals: Sweet Dog, Sweet Potato Pie Pup and the Baked Potato on the canine side; MeanCat (history’s greatest monster), the Lady Orangey, the Extra Orangey, Big Eyes (AKA the Punching Assassin), Drunk Uncle Orangey (the feral cat who hung out in the heated condo on Skinnerville front porch), The Little Kitty (introduced by Drunkle) and Baby Alien Agent Orangey representing the felines. Plus the most dangerous criminal gang in town, the Eastside Orangeys—a colony of feral cats whom Skinner and his wife Theresa feed. (All the EOs except Creamy Polenta have been fixed, and he’ll join the ranks soon.)

In the months I’ve lurked, we’ve all suffered the loss of the Lady Orangey, who disappeared one day, and Drunkle, who was hit by a car on his way across the street for first or possibly second breakfast one morning. It still pains me to see the front porch filled with potted plants instead of his condo, pillows and food dishes. (Baby Alien Agent Orangey was a gang member with the Eastsides; after several months Chez Skinner, she’s tentatively becoming a full-fledged family member.) But every day I check on the morning and evening tributes to the Eastside Orangeys, as they gather to receive dry and wet catfood, and occasionally some shredded chicken. I'm expecting Creamsicle 3 to appear through the catflap at Skinnerville in a few days and just join the clan.

Well, but it’s not just the menagerie that makes me thankful; it’s Skinner’s relentless countering of all the ugliness in the world (macro and micro—including a lot of gun violence in his city) by concentrating on the beauty that surrounds us. He thinks of the people around him as his neighbors, even if he meets them committing crimes, and he treats them that way. That’s something I think about a lot. What if the jerk who cuts in front of you in traffic is actually your neighbor, trying to get to a much-needed doctor’s appointment? Maybe the clown on the conference call who will not bloody shut up is your neighbor who’s having a crap day and is struggling to hold it together? Could the person fluttering at the customer support call center be your neighbor on her first week of the job?

Well, I dunno—that’s kind of a stretch for impatient me, but I do think about it.

Skinner does another thing, though, that I can totally get behind: cultivating beauty. His yard is a riot of growing things—basil (guarded relentlessly by history’s greatest monster), Tithonia, camelias, gardenias; a koi pond with sacred lotus and water lilies; kumquats and other things. When work things get ugly, he doubles down on the beautiful things.

And here’s the thing—the beautiful things are all around us, if we only look for them. If we only cultivate space in our hearts for them. I thought about that yesterday morning when I passed by pine trees and realized they were giving me stars:

That made me think about all the other stars I see all the time, but don’t pay enough attention to. 

I’m working on that, though—cultivating beauty, which is—after all—part of cultivating gratitude.

Thank you, Patrick.