Belated Tortie Tuesday Post: Charlie and the Hummingbird

I slept badly on Friday night--kept waking up sneezing. This is often an indication of some sort of pesticide vapor drift. I went into town anyway, feeling sluggish and grumpy. A lot of people who usually come to Friday Market didn't, although the weather was that perfect "sunny and 75" (degrees Fahrenheit) their favorite radio station often blares songs about. One claimed to have come to market, then felt too bad to shop and gone back. It was a sluggish and grumpy market; another day when all good cheer seemed to be imported from Tennessee.

Some booksellers have been discussing the question of whether it's possible to sell vintage fiction in hardcover editions that have lost their paper jackets. I had a few to test my theory that it is. A lady picked up a copy of a football player's memoir, They Still Call Me Assassin. "Assassin?" she murmured.

"Do you remember when that guy used to play football?" I murmured. Most people in my home town wouldn't, because "The Assassin," Jack Tatum, retired just about the time my town started picking up TV channels that broadcast NFL games. He reminisced about O.J. Simpson and Larry Csonka, and wisecracked about Jerry Rice.

I happened to have a copy of one of Daphne Du Maurier's other novels, My Cousin Rachel, that had lost its jacket. "This is the novel of suspense I brought this week," I said. This is what the jacket would probably have looked like.



So she took both books and walked away looking pleased. My Cousin Rachel sold well enough that its resale value isn't high, but for anyone who likes clean, romantic novels of suspense it's a bargain. For anyone who wants to resell rare books, Jack Tatum's second memoir was the bargain. It did not sell well in its own time; no use showing a picture of it here because Amazon doesn't even have one. It's become a collector's item.

Well, first I found a fabulous deal on some of the blue yarn I want for the Anti-Bullying Blue Hats display, two extra-large shopping bags full. Then a person who was stuck in per own store was wanting to know whether people were moving in or out of another store, which was on my way. I walked a block up the street, found that they were moving out, and had three more bags full of old books thrust upon me. I also wanted to bring home some provisions for the weekend. This was going to be quite a load to carry. I asked a retired person who likes to get out and drive, when not feeling too ill. "Not driving today," person said. "I think I've got flu. Everybody in the building seems to have it."

I flagged down a younger person who was driving in the right direction, we took advantage of a sale on Route 23, and on the way back I could see what had given me such an unpleasant night and probably given the whole retirement project their "flu." There might actually be some sort of virus making the rounds. I know what you're thinking, since I mentioned someone being sick within minutes after drinking a V-8 in last week's status update, and it is not Norwalk Flu. If that person had had Norwalk Flu I would have smelled its unmistakable odor, person would not have been fit to drive home, and I would have had some symptoms during the last week. But all those older people might have had some sort of "summer cold." Maybe they had a summer cold. Funnily enough patches of vegetation along Route 23 were starting to brown out from glyphosate spraying. What a coincidence.

A body is a system, so tracing causes and effects is not as simple as people want to imagine. Someone shared, after I'd tweeted a bit about exactly how our cats Traveller and Bisquit died, that their symptoms--especially coughing up froth--sounded like algae poisoning. Dogs can show that symptom, and sometimes die, after drinking stagnant water contaminated with some kinds of algae. Cat Sanctuary cats normally drink out of a fast-moving stream that has never contained visible algae. But then somebody else shared that glyphosate can promote the growth of the kind of algae that make water undrinkable...The fact that some of these things are only secondary effects of a glyphosate poisoning episode does not mean that glyphosate didn't cause them.

I'm disgusted by our Environmental Protection Agency's caving on the question of those "glyphosate causes cancer" labels. It is virtually impossible to prove that anything is a sole or even a primary cause of cancer; there's still some debate about X-rays and DDT as well as cigarettes. (For what it's worth, the major carcinogen in cigarettes is not the tobacco but the bleached white paper.) However, glyphosate causes tissue damage on contact. People who breathe the vapors may sneeze or cough blood from the respiratory tract. People who eat or drink contaminated food may form bleeding ulcers, and they can be massive and bleed heavily, all along the digestive tract from the lips down. People who get glyphosate on their skin may get a mild rash or form huge bleeding lesions. Any or all of these things PROMOTE THE GROWTH of cancer, although these and the other glyphosate reactions people are having may be even more likely to cause death before cancer has time to grow.

I don't expect to die from cancer of the colon. If we don't get a serious glyphosate ban, I don't expect to survive long enough for that to happen. I've had celiac sprue for most of this year with only a few days between episodes. Celiacs for whom the sprue reaction becomes chronic usually die when the intestines stop repairing themselves and become "leaky" enough to cause blood poisoning. It's not a pleasant way to go but it is fast; people are usually going about their daily routines up to the last week or so.

I had celiac sprue all weekend. Still have it at the time of writing.

Still going about my weekend routine, I went out in the front yard and burned the trash. While the pages of a magazine that was in too bad condition to resell were burning, I heard a peculiar sort of sound. It mght have been a bird or a cat.

"Who said that?" I asked the cats. Samantha and the spring kittens seemed to have nothing to squeak about. "Where's Serena?" I asked the cats. Serena popped up from behind a bush. I watched the flames die and turned to go back indoors.

Serena pointed to a tiny damp kitten squirming about on some pressed-down dayflowers, a little ginger tom with a long tail. It reminded me of a stuffed toy of my childhood. "Is your name Charlie? Charlie Dale Lion?" The kitten's ears weren't open yet. Serena, however, was nonverbally saying, "Yes, you can call him Charlie if you like. Now come and let me show you another thing."

I followed Serena to the porch. She scratched vigorously at a chair. "You're saying the chair is blocking the way to your nest? You want to put Charlie in your nest?" Serena agreed. I moved the chair. Serena scratched at a bag. I moved the bag. Serena chirped appreciatively and disappeared into the nest where she'd reared the spring kittens.

I went back into the yard and kept an eye on Charlie, shooing flies and mosquitoes away from him. Though too young to see or hear, he could smell; he followed traces of his mother's scent on me and thus began following me around about a square foot of crushed dayflowers; we've bonded. Presently I heard a loud buzz. A wasp's or hornet's threat display? No, it was the hummingbird, watching this unusual human and cat behavior in between sips from the jewelweed.

I say "the" hummingbird. For years I only ever saw one. One day last summer I sat out in the driveway in a visitor's car, with a good view of the jewelweed, and saw that "the" hummingbird had a mate and family. I still don't know where the nest is, whether they're rearing babies again this year, or even--thanks to my astigmatism--whether it was Mr. or Mrs. Hummingbird who flew up to look at the kitten and me. I thought how conveniently nature times these things: although the hummingbirds don't eat insects, as the cardinals do, they do pollinate the pretty jewelweed flowers, during the weeks when the cardinals are mostly hiding. The cardinals usually don't let other songbirds hang around the Cat Sanctuary, except when we've had house wrens who were willing to stay closer to the house than the cardinals do.

I saw the Isodontia wasp. I saw the new Chlorion aerarium who's taken the place of last spring's office-mate Jade--Jadeite, of course. I saw Polistes carolina and a lonely little Polistes fuscatus. There weren't very many flies and mosquitoes, although the cardinals and most other songbirds keep a low profile in August. It was another humid but otherwise perfect afternoon.

Sunny and 75

Usually the birth of four kittens takes most of a day but, within two hours, Serena came out, still a "big fat cat." She hadn't bulged a great deal before giving birth and didn't look much thinner afterward. Looking damp and triumphant, she let me place Charlie in the nest with his classic calico sister and two black-and-white kittens of undetermined gender. All four have long tails.

Burr was with us all weekend too, a proud and devoted social cat...grandfather? Father? Surely not. Could Burr be the father of four healthy long-tailed kittens? In any case there was no question of his doing them any harm, as there is with some tomcats. Burr's main interest is in Samantha but he is another tomcat, like his great-grand-uncle Mac, who protects kittens.

I wondered whether glyphosate had anything to do with the sudden and rapid birth of these kittens. If so it doesn't seem to have harmed them--yet. They all dried off looking exactly the way newborn kittens are supposed to look: eyes closed, ears curled in, coats fluffy but sparse, every claw sticking out of every little bare paw.

I went online again yesterday and today. Storms roiled around the area. Internet connectivity comes and goes, or comes up showing as "limited." I saw the person who'd complained of "flu" on Friday driving again today. So far, I've not heard of any casualties of this glyphosate poisoning episode. But either the rain's not washed the poison out of the air, or it's washed into the local water supply; I've not noticed any evidence that I'm recovering from it, myself, either.

The kittens, the estivating songbirds, the friendly insects, the hummingbirds, the other animals and human children who were born this summer need your help, Gentle Readers. Spread Glyphosate Awareness everywhere. Spread it especially to St. Louis, Missouri, if you know people there.