Tortie Tuesday: Snow!

Tortie Samantha, who is mostly black with orange and white spots, and Calico Serena, who is mostly white with orange and black spots, have seen snow before. The spring kittens Silver (whose name is properly Silver Heels, for her most distinctive feature) and Swimmer (who hasn't done any more swimming lately, but demonstrated the ability around the time she started eating solid food) have not seen snow before. So what was their reaction to it?

"Where's breakfast?" they nonverbally said. "You're late."

I woke up on time, turned on the light and the computer, and waited for daylight to arrive. Veterans Day had been a nice, mild, sunny day, nice for those who wanted to get in one last day at the lake; trees that change fast had already shed their leaves, while trees that change slowly were still mostly green. Around bedtime I'd heard rain pattering on the roof. The sky was still cloudy. Daylight was late. When it was obvious that sunrise had occurred behind heavy cloud cover, I looked out to double check that the rain had stopped.

"SNOW?!"

The ground was still warm, but the air was not. A cold wind had blown this snow our way. The temperature outside the north-facing door was 27 degrees Fahrenheit. Snow on the ground was melting. Snow on the leaves of trees was sticking tight. The hillsides showed a weird color mix I've not seen before here, with the red-brown carpet of leaves and patches of bright green grass showing through where snow had melted on the ground, some bare gray trees, some bright autumn-leaf-color trees, some bronzy-green trees that were just starting to turn brown, and some trees whose leaves were still bright, light, summery green frosted with snow.

It's not an Ice Age. It's not Global Warming. It's not even unprecedented; one year when I was in the city--was it 1987?--we had a couple of inches of snow in October, before we'd had even one frosty night. It's just unusual weather. I'm now looking out toward the slopes of Clinch Mountain. I've seen them all my life and I've never seen them look quite like this.

I was more interested in the weather than the cats were. To them it's not news that the weather's turned cold instead of hot. There are still boxes and sacks of fabric--blankets, rugs, quilts and quilt material--on the porch, and the cats still have a snug little space where they've pulled layers of thick fabric down over a crack between bins, where they can curl up and snooze till their collective bodywarmth gets too warm to suit them. The ingenuity with which they've insulated their den might look as if human hands and brains had had to be involved. They weren't. Serena and Traveller did it, last winter, all by themselves. They probably discovered, rather than planning, the benefits of constructing three-stage vestibules where they slither through non-parallel openings that create layers of warm and semi-warm air around their warm space. The kittens were born in this den and went back to it when the weather turned cold. With their thick winter fur growing in they're as snug in the den as an Eskimo family in an igloo. All they need now is fuel to keep their bodies putting out all that delicious heat, and they're ready for whatever the winter weather may do.

So--"Where's breakfast? Are we out of that extra-juicy kibble? Too bad. Why don't you go and look for some more of that kind, or cook some more chicken and rice, or better yet some fish?" is what they said.

I had bought fish maybe three or four times in the last thirteen years, because, like most people who live near the coast, I had become a bit spoiled about fish. In the point of Virginia fish comes in tins and has a strong odor. In Maryland fish is shoved into bags and packed on ice, at the dock if not right on the boat, so the odor develops only as the fish begins to cook, and if you add lemon juice and tarragon a person can't walk into the house the next day and tell that you cooked fish. I like fish but I didn't want a fishy-smelling home. I ate fish when Oogesti took Mother and me to the China Star, where we always bought a take-out box of baked salmon for the cats and picked bits off before giving it to them. And once I opened a tin of tuna that did not have a heavy odor, so I bought another tin of tuna, but it did, so after that all the fish I bought was marked "For Cats" and was opened outdoors.

But Oogesti is no longer with us, and my Significant Other said, "Everybody around here always wants to cook chicken! What I'd like to find is a person that knows how to cook fish!" and in the face of such relentless pressure I thought about the possibility that lemons and tarragon might work on tinned tuna and mackerel the same way they work on fresh sizzling-hot haddock, whitefish, or salmon fillets.

Well, almost.

Anyway I've been buying more mackerel lately, for the omega-3 oil content. The mackerel fish has fins and scales, and little sharp bones, while living, but when it's cooked most of the scales come off, leaving a bare slick black or white inner skin, and the bones melt down like salmon bones. When you open a tin you can still find the bones and crumble them with a fork. If you cook them with rice they disappear as entirely as a calcium supplement pill.

The resulting meal still smells like cat food, but lemon and tarragon do keep the odor from lingering in the house.

Samantha, who thinks the smell of fish can only ever be an improvement on anything, does a remarkable job of keeping the empty tins from making the recycling smell fishy. She can jump six feet straight up in the air, easily. If a taller person were trying to carry an open tin that used to contain fish past her, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see her jump eight feet.

"Samantha, this is ridiculous," I say sternly, holding the tin out of her path and putting it where she couldn't get at it. "You know you'll get to lick the tin. You don't need to act stupid about it."

"But I do!" Samantha nonverbally says. "How else am I going to show you the difference between good ordinary everyday food and delicious food? Fish is delish-is! I have to tell you how much I love fish!"

The kittens act calmer about food because acting as if she were completely beside herself with appetite is Samantha's job. Social cats tend to specialize. Samantha does a more credible mad-cat act than anyone else, so the others leave her to it.

At least fish is one thing that, if it's not seasoned with poison-sprayed sauce or packed in poisoned water, is unlikely to contain glyphosate.