Wednesday, November 24, 2010

the unfinished noho threnody


Wednesday 24 November 2010.... Turners tongues


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read... Lucked out... Cutting the pie...

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

Monday, November 22, 2010

chloe

Page Seventy-five

No picture of Chloe today, though there may be one or two in my storage unit. Many times I wonder, really wonder, if I will ever indeed SEE my own belongings again. See them, touch them, and live in all the memories that they will waken, both in my mind and in my heart.

Chloe was born on 7 August 1992, along with her five brothers and sisters. Like almost everyone in the litter, she was grey and white, built small and compact. She lived with us until the first week in January 1993, when she and her brother Brucie went off east to live with my parents. Like Mugsy and some other animals, Chloe would become a victim of my mother's extreme psychological changes in the year 2000, and there would be a sad ending to a life that began so happily.

Before that time, though, Chloe had a good life. She was adored and pampered by me and my daughter, and by her feline mother and grandmother. She was the most shy and reticent member of the Maman family, and always had to be treated with a bit more delicacy than the other cats. As for the outdoors, in those first five months of her life that she was here in the Turners miasma, she didn't care much for the outside. A little time outdoors was fine for her, and after that she liked her creature comforts. She was especially close to her sister Zoe, who also didn't need much of the outside world until she got older, so they chummed around together a lot in the apartment.

I loved Chloe and Brucie in the same way that I loved all of my other animals, and the only reason I could let them go at all was because they were still going to be part of my family, though at a distance. I would never have given them to anyone but a relative, and I knew they would have a great life with my parents. Whatever else my mother was before her terrible crash in 1997, she was almost always excellent to her animals, and I had no worries for my two kids on the day they drove off with her (though I still cried for days for missing them).

I had no crystal ball. I couldn't see the big black wall of shit that was to come. Many times since 1997 I've attacked myself, wondering, SHOULD I have known that such a thing might come? I'd surely seen certain traits in my mother all my life that hinted at danger. SHOULD I have figured out that such a day could come?

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read... Sehnen... Lifelines...

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

robin




Page Seventy-four

saturday 20 november 2010
turners unfeels

Do I have to say what kind of animal Robin was? Born in spring 1990 and died in November 1994. Brought to me as a nestling by my loving cat Melinda. I do indeed have a photo, but it will have to wait. Haven't been able to use the scanner for three days.

Nestling means that Robin was all feathered in when Mindy brought her, ready to learn to fly but not there yet. Unable to get her own food. Still pulling the head back, opening wide, and cheeping when she was hungry. Like all young members of the thrush family of birds, she had a white a breast with black spots. As far as I know, robins are the only thrushes that lose these spots with the first molt.

We had gone on a trip down to Disney World in 1990, returned around the tenth of June, and only a few days later, no more than a week, Mindy brought this young bird to the bottom of the stairs. I was already in possession of a female sparrow that Mindy had brought as a nestling the year before. Mindy seemed very eager to help me increase my number and knowledge of birds.

I fed the little bird myself, on wet bread and baby food, and she survived. Most often they don't, but she did. There was one little glitch that I hadn't encountered with birdlings before, and that glitch was lice. An unbelievable number of the tiny little buggers. In the nest, the mother bird takes care of de-lousing, and since I was now the mother bird, I had to think of something. I didn't want to use chemical, store-bought preparations, either on the bird or in the room where I was keeping her. I had read more than once that many bugs don't like garlic (right along with vampires), and so I made garlic water by soaking diced garlic in jars of water for a day or two. Then I washed the bird, her box, her bedding, and wiped down all the furniture in the room with garlic water. It worked, folks. Only had to do it twice, and all the little lice was gone.

Unlike all of my other birds, who lived on seeds of various sorts, Robin consumed mynah bird pellets, which had been doing well for my mother's blue jay for ten years. But the blue jay would eat them dry, whereas the Robin would eat very few of them in the hard, dry state. Not surprising, I guess, since robins seem to live on moist foods most of the time. I had to soak the pellets in water until they were soft, and then all was well. This was the mainstay of her diet, with occasional pieces of wet bread, which she liked, or blueberries, or hamburger.

Robin's is a death I feel at least partly responsible for, and therefore it's hard to write about. Not because I don't want to admit my mistake, but because a dark ball of self-disgust rises up, and extra pain on top of the normal load that I live with every day.

She shines, like all the others, as one of the bright stars on the map of the years I've lived, and I miss her, like all the others, still today.
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read... All my stars... Stolen stars...

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

spotty

Page Seventy-three

wednesday 10 november 2010 .... turners festers

~~} Bold yellow sun lights the land where you run,
~~} burns so bright all its shadows are black.
~~} You rest in the shade where the danger lies wait:
~~} how long will it let you come back?

He was yet another grandchild of Maman, that mother extraordinaire. I have no picture to show you, but he was a small cat, white with grey patches. Hence the name. And I must have named him in a period of great fatigue, because I usually came up with names slightly more original than Spot. That's as bad as Fido or Rover. But most of my animals had multiple nicknames, and for him these were: Spotty, Mr. Spock, Spocky boy.

Like everyone in his family, Spotty was a home boy. Even when free outdoors, these cats never strayed very far from home, unless something really out of the ordinary happened. And the family also tended toward smallnes, which in the case of Spotty's litter was smaller still. None of the six ever got to what you'd call a normal size for an adult cat, and I think this might have been because their parents were half-siblings.

Sixteen years after his death, I still sadden to say that his life was a short one. In the debate between indoor-cat and outdoor-cat, there are good points on both sides. And I have argued the question within myself thousands of times over the years. In most times and places, I opted for outdoor cats. And the indoor people can rant and say that I'm wrong, that I shortened my cats' lives by letting them go outdoors, and in the latter point they are correct. But I had reasons, reasons which I consider just as valid and well-considered as anything they can say, for deciding on outdoors. Not going to elucidate them here, as this is supposed to be Spotty's post, but maybe I'll go into them somewhere on my website, at some future time.

Two years and three months was the amount of time he lived. A short time, but a happy one. He was happy. The dark cloud in his life was the cat next door, a particularly aggressive tom called Skip, who would come to our porch and beat on Spotty, who was only half his size. I tried not to get TOO furious with Skip, because he belonged to people who didn't take very good care of him, and I think this contributed to his generally unhappy nature (he belonged to the same crowd that Rabbit did, and they didn't take much care of HER either). But I did get SOMEWHAT furious when I would hear snarls and shrieks from Skip and Spotty's very unique, loud hum of terror coming from the porch. We all know the expression "scared shitless." This is what happened to poor, timid Spot every time Skip came to the porch to assert dominance. I'd rescue him, of course. And as I've said, this was the only dark cloud in Spotty's otherwise happy life.

read... Shadowpoems... Extemporaneana...

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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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