Our family has, over the years, accumulated an interesting group of animal tales. This could become a writing project. We also currently have quite a few animal TAILS, 34 to be exact, if I can count 21 chicken tail feathers. Year before last, when Megan was still out at Shasta college, before she transferred to Chico State, she did a project in her statistics class where they graphed the number of pets each of the students had. Those with the least pets were listed on the left of the board, with numbers increasing as you moved to the right. Megan's name ended up on the far right of the board, all alone, separated from the other city students by several inches of empty board. Her number at that time was 36, but we lost 2 of our little goats last year. It was a sad year. I still miss Jar-Jar and Binks, and get teary every time I ride by their little graves out at the back edge of our 20 acres. The graves are decorated, both, with a rainbow arch of colored stones, symbolic of the meadow at the edge of the rainbow, where they now are frolicking forever.
Besides our domestic pets, our property is home to a myriad of creatures, including frogs, birds, coyotes, skunks, mice and various other rodents, snakes, spiders and insects. The bird group includes everything ranging in size from hummingbirds to turkey vultures and herons. One blue heron's actual residence is the lake on the adjoining property, but he seems to love our front meadow as a sort of park, where he can preen and parade to his heart's content during the day, upsetting my paint mare to no end. She is sure he's going to zoom over and eat her. There's a barn owl who also inhabits one of the neighbor's enormous old oaks, but who is fond of perching in the mulberry next to my front lawn and stalking my chihuahuas. He fights fair, though, and usually warns us with a soft Whoo-hoo of his presence. One night, Kaela and I took the little dogs out for their bedtime walk, and he decided to have a little fun, and let go with the most ear-splitting screech, sending us all scurrying for our lives back indoors. Was he trying to say, "Get those dogs back in the house before I do something you'll regret, I'm extra hungry tonight"? Who knows.
I do feel like the intruder here, the visitor. The animals and oaks and manzanita and their kind have been here for eons. I want to tread lightly, do no harm. I celebrate each acorn that sprouts, am mindful that it will be decades before it becomes an actual tree. I am dismayed by the paths we and our machines have made, razing the delicate vegetation, which struggles in our desert state just to exist, right down to the iron-rich red clay. I am saddened by the bareness in our pastures, where horses and goats have overgrazed. I try to compensate in whatever way I can, composting manure and spreading it to enrich the soil, rotating pastures, avoiding the paths so they can regrow. I am the visitor, not the blue heron or the owl. Although they make their actual "homes" on adjacent properties, I'm sure they have no concept of fences. It's all one great northern continent, to them.
My neighbor's cat likes my property a lot, too. I have a theory about this. My neighbor keeps her 10 acres very, very tidy. At least half of it is actually landscaped! She sprays her oaks to get rid of those "annoying" web-worms, and uses herbicide on the perimeter to reduce fire danger. She hires people to come in weekly and collect leaves and other detritus and burn or otherwise dispose of it. She washes her driveway. I think I saw pictures of her place in a recent issue of Sunset magazine.
Then there's my place.
It's very . . . natural. I like things a little overgrown. Okay, so it's A LOT overgrown. And we have all these animals, thus animal feed, thus--mice. And ground squirrels. The cat has a field day over here. We love her for coming over to help us at least try to control the rodent population. We don't have a cat of our own, due to our labrador's habit of playing with small things in an overenthusiastic manner until they expire, but that's a whole 'nother blog. (The lab is actually quite a good hunter, too, but you can't beat a cat for speed.) The only down side of having the cat around is that my paint mare is--you guessed it--afraid of her. Lindy is sure that little black cat is a panther, ready to sneak up on her, pounce, and tear her to shreds.
Today, I'm doubly thankful for my neighbor's cat, because it's her fault I thought of the Animal Tales writing project. When I spied her wandering across my front meadow yesterday, I thought of a black cat we--uh--lived with, years ago (I almost said "owned," but that would have been grossly inaccurate). Zelda. Now that cat had some stories.
But that's a whole 'nother blog.
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