Coexistence

There is a black cat who lives in my neighborhood. I don't think it's a stray or someone's outdoor cat. I think it may be feral. It's not sleek and shiny. Its hair stands on end. It looks healthy enough but is definitely not overfed.

I see it sometimes early in the morning settled into one of the cushioned patio chairs when I come outside to drink my coffee. It looks at me steadily, calmly, for a few moments before slowly abandoning the comfortable spot. It doesn't startle and run off. It just cedes the territory, eyebrow arched, letting me know it will be back. While I don't see the cat often, some mornings I do see a bit of fur left behind in the chair. I assume it's there more often than I see it, early in the morning or during the night. 

One morning, recently, as I sat outside with my coffee and my notebook, I heard a sudden rustle behind me. I turned quickly enough to see the black cat dive into the weeds along the fence, through a hidden corridor under the greenery. It swooshed down the twenty-foot patio and suddenly reappeared at the other end with a little leg hanging down out of its mouth.

My jaw dropped. I held very still. The cat stood still for a moment as well, looking for a way out of the yard. The prey in its mouth posed a brief spatial puzzle. Which way to fit through? Under the gate? Around? And then it was gone. I could not see in what direction it went to tear up its prey and eat its breakfast. 

What did the cat catch? A very tiny baby bunny, perhaps, that had wandered from the nest? More likely a rat. Though I've never seen one around the exterior (or interior) of my house, the local paper tells me they're probably there in the alley. Whatever it was, I think it was too big to be a mere mouse. 

This little bit of excitement made me think some more about something that had happened the previous week in my backyard. I had come down the back stairs in the morning and found a dead mouse at the bottom. It seemed an unlikely place for a mouse to expire, but there it was, laid on its side, attracting flies.

I'm no stranger to dead mice. There are always boxes of Deacon mouse bait in the dark corners of my attic. The little critters occasionally die right out in the open, instead of just passing away in the walls and stinking for a day or two. I don't like having to pick them up and take them to the garbage. Back in the days when a husband and sons lived in this house, I was not ashamed to be squeamish and rely on them to pick up dead mice. But now that's my job. I got a trowel from the garage and a plastic grocery bag from the house and used the one to flick the mouse remains into the other. I walked quickly to the garbage can, dropped it in, and was glad to be done. 

But now I wonder. I've heard stories from cat owners of their indoor pets leaving them trophies at the bottom of the stairs in the early morning hours — the mice they've killed in service of their masters. Did that black cat leave that mouse for me, in tribute to my ownership of the backyard? Or maybe, as an acknowledgement of our shared reign? Is this cat truly feral, or is it remembering some old relationship with a human who cared about it?

Just a few days ago I again saw the cat, this time in my herb garden. It snuck around the oregano and crouched expectantly on top of the chives. I couldn't quite see it, but I heard the pounce into the sage.  Did it catch anything? I don't know. 

Treasuring summer, even in the heat

Garden ornament by Sue at FaithInClay.com 

It's gonna be a hot one.

The eggplant I brought home from the farmers' market a little while ago is warm and radiating heat on the kitchen counter. That dark purple skin absorbed plenty of energy just this morning, lying in the sun on the farmer's table in the asphalt parking lot that hosts the market. I bought corn and tomatoes, a single large beet, a bell pepper, and a quart of blueberries. The local peaches I look forward to all summer are ripening in a basket at the back of the counter, and there are glads, standing tall in a vase -- not in the living room or dining room, but right at the entrance to the kitchen where Eliza and I will see them whenever we come into the house.

This is summer. A season of family vacations, swimming in lakes, playing in the backyard, hanging laundry out to dry at Grandma's house. Summer theater, summer concerts, mosquitoes, and baseball. Memories of my dad painting the house with Grandpa helping in those weeks between summer school and the start of the fall term. We kids arranged the sliced tomatoes and bologna sandwiches for lunch and later watched as Daddy cracked open a beer at 3:30 in the afternoon, before cleaning up for the day. The cold bottle sweated and dripped in the outdoor air, just as we did. 

The heat did not seem so malevolent then. Meteorological data shows it's worse now, and we know now that heat creates deadly risk, especially for people who are old and on the margins. That was probably true in 1965, too, but like pollution and everything having to do with humankind's abuse of nature, so much worse now.

When it's very cold and when it's very hot, I often think of the people who lived on this land a century or two ago. How did they do it? How did they experience the weather's life-threatening extremes? This morning as I came outside to get the car out of the garage, I thought of Aunt Eller, my character in a production of "Oklahoma!" fifteen summers ago. Aunt Eller's appearance onstage starts the show, and it was my favorite thing to do — to walk out on stage, gaze into the lights and see a summer morning rolling in from the east, the sky growing bluer by the minute. She was anticipating the heat and the work of the day and then shared that picture with Curly singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning." I don't know what the audience saw looking back at us, but it sure was beautiful from where I sat. 

Aunt Eller had sweat rolling down her back within the hour, part of belonging to the land her family farmed. And that land, of course, originally belonged to indigenous people who had themselves belonged to it for millennia. 

I just finished reading "The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science," by Andrea Wulf. Humboldt lived from 1769-1859. He was a polymath, a man of wide-ranging knowledge, not just of science, but also of poetry, classics and politics, He wrote numerous books, some detailing botanical and zoological discoveries from his exploration of South America, others more sweeping views of Nature and the Cosmos. He was widely read and widely celebrated in the 19th century, an important influence on Darwin and later, John Muir. Unlike the cataloguers and classifiers of this and that species who preceded him, he saw the natural world as a unity, one organism, and wrote about the interdependency of plants, animals, climate and geography decades before Ernst Haeckel, a German scientist who'd read his Humboldt, coined the term Ökologie, from the Greek oikos "house, dwelling place, habitation."

What is this? I didn't plant it.

So here I sit in my backyard looking, thanks to my recent exposure to Humboldt, with the eye of an amateur scientist as well as an habitual poet. It's not ninety degrees — yet, not quite time to go inside and seek relief in the air conditioning—so I'm trying to treasure the details, the smallest plants and insects that make up my world. The plants and weeds that surround the patio are all very green because there's been plenty of rain. The decades-old grapes growing on the fence continue to flourish and fascinate preschoolers walking by with their parents. The purple flowers left on the sage plant are still attracting bees while the bowl that held my fruit and yogurt attracts flies, who also like to land on my bare legs. 

This suburban street is a long way from the second-growth state park forests that were the back-to-nature destinations of my childhood. And in 2022, I am far more aware of the threat that out-of-balance human beings pose to the organism that is planet earth. But there are pale butterflies fluttering across the patio and birds chirping as they settle in for a less-active afternoon in the heat. Even the bird poop on the chair I'm not sitting in is part of creation, part of the creator's worked-out vision of unity. 

Praise be!

(Also, praise be that Congress is actually about to pass climate change legislation!)