Temperatures are still below freezing. Somewhere on a screen porch, inside a big pile of blankets and shawls, is a little old lady with a Pelonis hot-air fan roaring away behind her and one of those dangerously efficient mini-heaters from Wal-Mart under the table with the laptop computer on it. Drudge and Serena are snug in the cellar.
Silver has formed a bad habit--bad because it involves her walking through the woods alone--of spending cold nights in the crawl space under a neighbor's porch, where she lies in front of the vent from the drying machine and comes home smelling like dryer sheets; I walked down there looking for her and saw her on the back porch of a house where the humans were not at home, along with three stranger cats. Apparently the strangers, who seemed lost and scared rather than feral, had been dumped out. The owner of the back porch where they were hanging out didn't want cats and had been trying to chase them away, but had been putting out "just a little food, not enough that they'll stay, just so they won't starve in the snow." To cats that says "Stick around and act pitiful; you'll soon have us trained." They hunt; they'll fill up on smaller animals (and pick up infections and infestations) while training a human to feed them. The stranger cats didn't get along with Wild Thyme or with the neighbors' pet cats, I was told. The two males hang out together, which for full-grown tomcats usually indicates that one or both have been neutered.
Silver is different. Silver is the only human or animal who does seem to get along--all too well, as in if she hadn't been spayed we'd have some rangy, long-tailed black kittens by now--with Wild Thyme. (Drudge "says" yelling a lot is just Wild Thyme's idea of a good game and humans should get used to it. I say humans shouldn't form a habit of ignoring cats' yelling.) Silver is the Possum Manager, and it looked to me as if Silver was in the process of making friends or pets of these newcomers. Silver remembers more than most cats do, and makes simple plans, just as Serena does. It will not surprise me if, after the big freeze when the food handouts disappear, she brings the new cats up here.
Animals
More flamingos at least visiting Florida:
(How bright is flamingo pink? Depends on what the birds have eaten lately. When they find carotene-rich food their feathers grow in bright pink; when their diet is otherwise adequate but low in carotene, their base color is white, and they can be any shade in between.)
Money
Seriously, President Trump is offering to set up savings accounts for kids, with a $1000 starter for new babies and the option of creating the same accounts with an initial investment from the family for children born before 2025.
Does this mean you, Young Readers, should go out and have a baby now? Ha! Ha! The "Trump Accounts" are a banksters' game--excuse me, an "investment plan" that may actually pay off in another eighteen or twenty years. None of the money can be withdrawn or used before the child is eighteen and, meanwhile, a baby can easily eat up more than $1000 out of its parents' savings in a single month.
And this planet really needs fewer and healthier babies.
When you're in a position to give them a good Green life, with a room and a garden for each child, then it's time to have a baby. One per couple is the right number. If all goes well you can adopt another one. Or another dozen, if rich enough.
Weird
That Francis Bacon wrote some plays he let Shakespeare claim--Shakespeare, perhaps, having revised the plays for theatrical production--I could believe; Bacon didn't write like Shakespeare but he might have appreciated their different talents and worked with Shakespeare. That other distinguished non-writers of the period might have at least fed ideas to Shakespeare that were worked into Shakespeare's plays, I could believe; Shakespeare was among the all-time best writers in English, but he was also, admittedly, a hack who wrote what rich patrons paid him to write. And that one of those non-writers might have been a "dark lady" called Emilia Bassano, an Italian Jew living in England, I could believe; Shakespeare did use a lot of variant forms of her given and family names in plays written during the same years when he was writing sonnets about his hopeless love for a "dark lady." Dark in the sense of mysterious even more than in the sense of hair and eye color. (It's a matter of speculation whether the people of the Mediterranean countries are the basic human color from which extreme Black and White types never developed, or are products of intermarriage between people on the northern and southern coasts. According to contemporary portraits, Emilia Bassano looked like a stereotypical Italian.) But, that Bassano actually wrote all of Shakespeare's work? Including the sonnets addressed to herself? What a weird historical fantasy...for someone to have published as history.
No comments:
Post a Comment