So on Saturday afternoon, probably still suffering from cognitive impairment from the last round of glyphosate poisoning, this divorcee who's trying to sell the house went out and poisoned his yard to get that Astroturf look. Somebody must have told him that that scorched-earth look will help the house sell.
Hah. If house buyers know what's good for them, they will look for "weeds." If I were buying a house, I'd look for clover. I'd look for dandelions. I'd look for everything but Bermuda grass, which people use glyphosate to protect even though it's a useless, ugly, invasive nuisance that looks like a poor imitation of a plastic mat at its "best," and Johnson grass, kudzu, and Spanish Needles, which people may hope glyphosate will kill but which it actually encourages. In fact, any Spanish Needles, or any browned-out, prematurely dead-looking tall "weeds" like goldenrod, would lower any offer I'd make. Say, if land normally sells for $1000 an acre, glyphosate-sprayed land might be worth $10 an acre...if someone wanted to be charitable to a poor fool who should never have been allowed to own land at all.
September was a very dry month. Everyone suffered their usual reactions to glyphosate spraying earlier in the month, aggravated by reactions to dicamba spraying, which some people hoped would be a less harmful alternative. Dicamba is known to be more toxic in the long run, and makes people cough, but in combination with glyphosate vapors dicamba seems to aggravate whichever of the fifteen or so types of reaction people have to glyphosate. Those of us who've identified the cause of our now chronic symptoms--and no, it's not age, because some of us are children--looked forward to heavy rain as the usual "edge of the hurricane." We got, for a change, sultry weather, with high levels of humidity and occasional micro-mini-"showers," and no real rain all month long. Reactions subsided slowly; the poisons began to break down in the air, but they had time to soak into things.
From the "tortoiseshell" cat's point of view, for Tortie Tuesday...
The humans seem surprised that my four grandkittens are dead. Why? I've known that for weeks, just by sniffing at my daughter Serena. Yes, of course she's still nursing kittens. Why not? Healthy cats enjoy nursing kittens, and Silver and Swimmer are still kittens! But the four new ones died long ago, when the nasty smell was in the air.
That was a loss, but as the human said, the Cat Sanctuary has seen a lot of late summer kittens come and go. Often they've come up here because their mothers died, and old Heather and her relatives would always try to adopt motherless kittens...although Heather herself never had much milk to give them, and couldn't keep her own kittens alive without her sisters' help. Only once, only two of one litter lived through the winter--the second litter poor little Patchnose weaned just before she died--and they were sickly kittens who grew up to be defective cats. Otherwise, we may feed them and groom them, but it seems that that's just postponing the inevitable. Nasty smells blow in on the air and the ones who hadn't already been sick just go out like lights.
Of course I like nursing kittens too. I induced lactation to help rear Silver and Swimmer. I'd do it again, but frankly I wasn't really counting on it. I knew Serena's second litter were undersized at best.
Serena didn't whine. She's a Queen. She's still rearing and teaching her two daughters, protecting me, and looking after those poor helpless humans who can't even catch a fieldmouse for themselves. Or smell things that are as plain as, well, the noses on their faces, apparently. How can such big noses be so useless to their owners?
Just to show how numb human noses are...As our readers know, we keep possums around to get rid of nasty stuff. Our paws weren't built to bury things deep enough to keep nasty smells from spoiling the air around our homes. Our wild relatives cope with that by freshening things with their own individual scents, then travelling around widely enough that the mix doesn't become overpowering. We have learned to exploit the natural tendencies of other species, such as humans, who bury things deeper, and possums, who simply eat them and magically transform them into almost odorless compost, to deal with all kinds of waste material we cats must unavoidably leave behind us.
When that nasty smell blew in, just before the pawpaws, persimmons, and apples started growing off the ends of the trees, the humans were hoping rain would keep the toxic chemicals from soaking into the fruit. Poor humans! I can't imagine why anybody would want to eat fruit, anyway, but they do.
Possums will eat a little of whatever we cats eat. Mostly they eat what we don't. They love fruit. They climb up trees to get at soft, squishy fruits like peaches and persimmons before the humans do. They use their short legs and long scaly tails to hold onto the trees but they can't actually swing upside down by their tails--not without falling off a branch, anyway.
Present Possum ate some persimmons and died. We cats knew at once. The humans didn't seem to. They looked at the sand pit and said, "Looks as if our Prezzie's eating up all the persimmons." They scooped out stuff and burned it in the trash barrel.
Phil O. Possum from up the road didn't know right away. Possums are only dumb animals, not as intelligent as cats or even humans; they don't hunt together, or spend much time together, but they do visit each other once in a while. Phil hadn't seen Prez for a while so he came looking for her. He got quite close to the body, but in his case his not noticing the odor was understandable. He was bringing her a pawpaw. Of course, being a possum, he could hardly carry a big pawpaw fruit any distance in his long, pointed mouth without dropping it. The greater part of the fruit would break off the part between his teeth, and he'd eat what was in his mouth, then pick up the fruit again and carry it until it fell apart again. But he carried it for several yards, and how he could even see with the sweet, heavy scent of pawpaw in his face, I can't imagine. He brought more than half the pawpaw all the way from the foot of the tree into our not-a-lawn.
Then he set it down, and he knew. Well, he knew that the job of cleaning up our waste material was now his if he'd have it. We encouraged him to take it. There was just one nasty smell he refused to do anything about, and you would have thought even a human would have noticed it by that time, but they didn't.
The days the humans call the weekend were especially sultry for the time of year. The last three days of September were hotter than most of the days in July and August, was what they said.
The old human up the road went back into town to stay indoors. He said he was too "old" to work in such hot weather. He had worked in hotter weather on days when those two horrible smells weren't so strong.
One of the humans down the road, who is smaller and younger than ours, but fatter, told our human, "I am close to having another 'mental breakdown'."
"What does that mean? Does she turn against cats?" I was wary. I worry less than I used to, knowing that Burr, Serena, and my human are all on my side, but I know some humans can become vicious.
"Oh, no, there's not a violent bone in that girl's body," our human said. "That smell we smelled on Saturday is 'Roundup,' which contains glyphosate. When that girl smells that smell, her thyroid gland falters. A weak thyroid gland usually just makes people sleepy. If it's really bad, they can get stuck in between sleeping and waking. They don't do much of anything. They're likely to sit down or lie down, where they are, and try to go to sleep. They just don't understand what's going on, and since people who have thyroid-related 'mental breakdowns' are usually very calm, sensible, businesslike people who don't waste much mental energy on emotion or imagination, when they start talking nonsense it's very noticeable and disturbing to other humans. Especially little children, like that one's."
Then at last the wind blew a wave of unbearable awfulness toward us, such that even the human said, "What is that horrible smell?" and went to look. It was, of course, our poor little Present Possum, or what was left of her, which wasn't much. Heat, humidity, and flies had been working fast to compost our composter.
I am not making this up. All the flesh on the top side of Present Possum was gone before any human even noticed she'd died. They are big, strong, useful pets to have, and very clever in their own way, but sometimes you have to wonder--however much you may like humans, and I am fond of mine--how it's possible for anything to be so thick and live.
"Possums never live very long," my human said sadly. "Their unique place in the ecology exposes them to a lot of microbes. Their unique metabolism makes them immune to almost all the microbes that make other animals sick, even unable to carry those microbes very far, but it undoubtedly makes them vulnerable to other diseases that only possums can get."
"Especially after they've smelled that 'Roundup' smell that makes so many living things sick," I observed. "It wasn't in the peaches and summer apples you ate. It was in the pawpaws and persimmons you ate yesterday. Prez ate some of those, and also a sparrow that I caught but didn't eat--too nasty."
"That fool down the road!" my human growled. "We need laws that punish people like that for 'Reckless Endangerment' of their neighbors, human and otherwise. The penalty should be that they have to move into 'housing projects' in cities for the rest of their lives, and their poisoned land is sold to their neighbors for a dollar an acre, just to make sure that fools who like the look of a poisoned lawn can't move in."
Actually, quite a lot of other living creatures think humans are just too thick to live. Serena and I are fond of ours but I must admit, even in our immediate family, that's a minority opinion. In some species, even moderate positions like Burr's and my granddaughters' ("Take the food they leave lying about, when they're not looking, and otherwise avoid them") are minority opinions.
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