She's a lot bigger than she was when she posed for this one clear picture, but her face and attitude have never changed. She is a Queen Cat. In this picture Serena was asserting control of what her mother, Samantha Scaredycat, had thought of as her very own Safe Space, or Samantha Box. (Samantha recognized her name and understood "Samantha Box" to mean the cage trap on which you see Serena sitting.)
Samantha was a true "tortoise-shell" or Tortie cat, mostly black with dapples of orange and white (and a few solid-color spots, like the orange on her face and white bib and paws). Serena is a Calico because she's mostly white with mostly clear patches of black and orange.
They are not "mean" cats. (There's a myth that three-colored cats are vicious. I've met a three-colored cat who was jealous and one who was unfriendly; Samantha was a panic biter in youth, but most three-colored cats are pleasant to have around. They seem to know they're special. Black and gray cats have the option of fading into the shadows. Three-colored cats do not, so there may be a biological reason why they seem to enjoy attracting lots of attention.) Serena and her two-toned gray-and-white daughters, Silver and Swimmer, are very playful cats. As kittens they bounced and pounced and romped and chomped. From time to time they made people go "Ouch" and, since they sincerely felt sorry they'd hurt their friends, they reached a consensus that it's better to engage humans in games that involve chasing objects.
They still like being chased, too, though. They're not cuddly. They will let people pet them, but their idea seems generally to be that the purpose of letting someone pick them up or stroke them is to bound away, waving their tails in the way cats do to say "Catch me if you can." When unable to start a game of tag they'll come back around, looking disappointed, and let themselves be petted, and then try to get chased again.
Now that the kittens are more than half grown, it's possible to say that Silver is growing up to be a normal-sized female cat, shorter and much slimmer than Serena, but strong and solid. Swimmer is still a small, thin cat, a featherweight; she's always been smaller and thinner than her siblings. When they play, Swimmer often seems the more energetic and more aggressive of the two. Compensating, no doubt.
Just to annoy the people who hate animal "interviews," I'll write about this weekend in that format:
Silver: It's been a wonderful weekend. Well, hot and humid, but it is high summer; it's supposed to be hot and humid. Anyway, all the animals have been perky and bouncy and have been having fun. What's the matter with the humans?
PK: Well, the oldest human at the Cat Sanctuary is finally growing "old." Because her sister and cousins were older than she was, she's now down to just one cousin who's only a few years older who's still alive. They liked to travel when they were younger. They used to like "road trips," where you rent a van and sleep in it wherever you find a good place near the road--a park or a truck stop. For years they talked about taking a road trip to visit each other but never saved up the money or firmed up the plans. This year they're saying it's now or never and calling it the Last Road Trip.The mother of some of The Nephews is going along.
Swimmer: That explains them but what's the matter with you?
PK: Well, I know people who planted vegetables this year. When I heard that "Roundup" had been taken off the U.S. market I was looking forward to being able to buy vegetables. This hot, wet weather has been terrible for our berries and cherries, most of which went moldy before ever becoming ripe, but it's just the kind of weather some vegetables like. So last week two people whose houses and cars were filling up with fresh vegetables thrust vegetables upon me. They did not even try to sell those vegetables in the Friday Market. This is a rural area. Most people who wanted to eat cabbages, cucumbers, summer squash, or green beans planted those things in their own gardens and are now sneaking about looking for unwatched porches to leave surplus vegetables on. Someone offered me a lift home from work one day and as I got out of the car she whipped out a shopping bag full of vegetables and said "You can take these, can't you?" Someone drove up to the Cat Sanctuary and, when I went out to the road to ask what news he brought, he held out a cabbage first, then a squash...Supermarkets do display vegetables. I suppose some people passing through town are still buying them, but this is one of the years when local people haul premium-grade fresh-picked vegetables around, trying to give them away. If the raspberries had had a chance to ripen, they might have been worth some money...too bad! The few that reached their "mature" size and color weren't very sweet.
Serena: We watched him and you pick off damaged outer leaves and nibble into the cabbage. There's no accounting for tastes. Only snails, humans, and one kind of caterpillar ever eat cabbage. You and that man were telling each other you liked it.
PK: Well, it was a delicious cabbage. Fresh and cool and juicy, almost like lettuce, with just a little of that special cabbage flavor. Cats somehow get by without being able to metabolize Vitamin C and probably other nutrients humans get from raw green vegetables, but humans need those nutrients. Baby humans don't usually like cabbage either, but grown-up humans love it. Also spinach, and lettuce, and all those delicious wild vegetables that stupid humans throw away like chickweed, English plantain, burdock, and dandelions. And stupid humans also think violets are only here to look at, but they actually bloom longer and spread further, in any part of a garden that is too shady for other vegetables, if you pick and eat about half of the blooms.
Swimmer: What about roses? It looks as if you were trying to kill the roses. I thought you liked them while they were blooming. Can't humans eat roses? Is that why you wanted to kill them?
PK: Humans can't eat rose leaves or petals. Only the fruits, most of which I like to leave for the cardinals. Rose fruits are dry and seedy, not unlike this year's raspberries, but full of Vitamin C, and good for humans or birds to eat in winter. But rose bushes need to be cut back when they reach a certain size, and the big white rosebush had grown bigger than it was supposed to be able to grow.
Silver: Does the hedge need to be cut back, too? What about the trees?
PK: Fruit trees need a little pruning now and then. Privet, the woody bushes whose seeds the cardinals eat in winter, needs a lot of pruning. Flybush, the flowering bush in the hedge, needs heavy pruning in June so the plants will be at the right height to bloom and look pretty in September. We always have to cut the house out of its overgrown hedge in early summer. The house was built to hug the ground, to hold warmth from the earth in winter and get lots of shade in summer...but if nobody prunes all those bushes and trees the house gets too much shade, and too much litter on the roof. I was looking forward to getting most of that pruning done over the weekend, even moving on to the orchard.
Serena: Then what happened?
PK: The cabbage happened to me. That was the only one of those vegetables I dared to eat--about half of it. I knew the others had been sprayed in early spring, but last year the people who owned the cabbage patch swore and vowed that they wouldn't spray their vegetables any more. Unfortunately, the cabbage patch is within sight of a paved road...and the Highway Board have been allowed to spray poison on the sides of roads. So after enjoying a lovely cabbage salad, I spent the next day beginning to be sick. I felt very grumpy for a few minutes, and then very lazy for the rest of the day. It's a symptom I've noticed after exposure to higher levels of glyphosate than a bowl of rice or Cheerios would contain. It was one of my older cousins' only reaction to glyphosate; he called it "The Lazies" and one day after a double exposure he died of it. What's actually happening is that the kidneys stop working, but what humans notice is that instead of working through the day and sleeping through the night, we work--slowly and inefficiently--for an hour or two and then doze for an hour or two, day and night. For some older people having "The Lazies" does not seem to make much difference to how much they get done during a day. For a writer? I might as well declare myself dead for a week and return to life when it's over.
Swimmer: But you did get some work done.
PK: Housework, yes. Yard work. Knitting. But writing? When writers are healthy, a glance at the Internet will always give us things to blog or Twitter about; or, when we need to focus on a specific writing job, if we disconnect from the Internet and just apply the seat of our pants to the seat of our chair and look at the computer screen, our brains will start thinking of words to put on the screen. We might write a few pages of garbage but eventually we'll finish a writing job if we just sit with it until the day's work is done. But when we have "The Lazies," we look at the computer screen and our brains go directly into sleep mode. We don't sit with the writing job; we nod off and wake up with something like "ffffffffffffffffffffskjlfffffffffffffffffff" all over the screen and chenille marks in the shape of a keyboard on our faces. Luckily I had no deadline to meet this weekend. I have two full-length books and a guest blogging project going on, and I didn't write a whole paragraph of any of them.
Swimmer: Well, we were having fun. Even Sommersburr.
PK: Yes. Your fans deserve to know. Sommersburr was ill after poison spraying occurred earlier this spring. I don't know his exact age but he's obviously a geriatric cat; when he wandered away coughing I thought he might be going off to die. He wasn't. He's a tough old thing. Some days he walks with a noticeable limp and some days he doesn't. Now that he's started training me to pet him he's very particular about where he does and does not want to be petted, telling me to stay away from sore places and massage stiff places. He complains a lot; it's probably just as well that I'm seldom sure what-all he's complaining about, but many things in this world aren't the way he would prefer them to be. But an old grumpy cat can be nice to have around too.
Swimmer: He's not grumpy with me. A bit bossy at times, but that's only so the others will know whose mate he is. Did you see him watch for you to get up, this morning, and wake me with a kiss so I'd be the first one on the porch waiting for breakfast?
PK: Your relationship is beautiful, Swimmer, especially since it's protecting you from having kittens. For humans what we call an "April and December" romance usually seems pitiful. For cats it can be sweet. A lot of older male humans only wish that a young female like you would like them if they didn't have any money.
Serena: I'm having the kittens around here. I'm going to try again. Soon.
PK: There's no danger of animal overpopulation as long as humans think the way to deal with plant overpopulation, or overgrowth, is to spray poison into the air! I can't stop you trying to have kittens but I don't expect they'll live. So many people go spray-crazy in summer, and so much poison is still drifting around in autumn...People need to remember that although weeding and pruning even an acre or two of unpoisoned land will take care of all their needs for physical exercise in the summer, it's actually fun. It's a lot more fun than mindlessly pumping iron and smelling other people's sweat in a gym. When you get out in fresh natural air and take control of the plant population around you in a natural way, you get to nibble on the freshest, tenderest vegetables and the ripest fruits, and smell the flowers, and watch the plants you are encouraging thrive as you take out the ones you want to weed out or prune back. If you've not been made positively ill by eating something someone else poisoned, the way I was this weekend, tending an organic farm or garden is a pleasure.
Silver: What about that man who brought the cabbage? Was he ill, too?
PK: I think so. His wife is always ill these days. Their grandchildren were there last week, so it's to be expected that they felt tired after the children left. Some things that look like symptoms may be something else; when a grandchild writes "I love you" in the dust on a car, some grandparents actually want to drive the car around like that until they've told everybody about their grandchildren, so it's not only that they feel too tired to wash the car. Then these two are about sixty; for some humans that may actually be "old," although they look more like the predominant breed of humans around here, for whom sixty is middle-aged. He said he felt all right this weekend but, when I looked in, he was sleeping through a favorite television program, and when he woke up he was grumpy. When people like them do notice symptoms of reactions to things like pesticide residues in their own unsprayed home-grown vegetables, they usually reach for over-the-counter pills, which cause additional reactions. Then it's hard even for their doctors to get any idea of what they're reacting to. One reason why humans don't realize how much harm our "pesticides" are doing to us is that a lot of humans do not normally enjoy natural good health.
Serena: We do our best to help you, though it's hard to help creatures who are designed to eat things like cabbages instead of natural food like mice and crickets. Sommersburr thought a little squirrel Silver caught might have done you good. I told him you wouldn't eat it and there was no use letting any of it go bad in the sun.
PK: You were right about that. I'm proud of Silver but I really didn't need even to look at the baby squirrel's tail in the yard.
Swimmer: I think I helped you more than that. Serena always tells us not to be soppy and silly, especially about humans. She says you'll never get any better at any interesting games if we start taking naps on your laps, pretending we are babies and you are our mothers. But when you lay down on the porch, we knew you had a special need, so it was all right to humor you just a little. I sat down beside you and purred until you woke up and picked up a stick for me to chase.
PK: I was not actually sleeping...but I was delighted to learn that, as a near-adult cat, you do remember how to purr.
Silver: We've heard you joking with other humans about an old cartoon series where a shelter cat had lost his purr. We are not shelter cats. We've just not seen much need to purr since we were babies who purred and cuddled with our mother, grandmother, and that uncle we used to have. If we ever have kittens we'll purr and cuddle with them. If our mother does we'll probably purr and cuddle with them, while they're here, since we were brought up as social cats.
PK: There's a natural progression of reactions as glyphosate passes through the body. If I'd absorbed it from airborne vapors the reactions would have begun with sneezing and possibly asthma. I suspect it all came from the cabbage, probably with some additional residues in other things I ate, because the reactions began with "The Lazies." That's passing on schedule--I'm certainly thinking of words to type today! Bleeding ulcers take longer to subside although the one that was visible yesterday, right on my tongue, is healing by now. In any case I'm sure a purr-and-cuddle session, which many cats normally do every day but which Swimmer did for the very first time in her life, helped me recover in some way. A cat's purr is a healing vibration. Who knows how much purring a cat needs to do, or whether the size of the cat makes any difference in any measurable reaction humans have...but even a small cat, purring for just a few minutes, has to help.
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