Saturday. Sofa. Coffee.
The morning walk is done and the oatmeal is on the stove, fortified by a teaspoon of coconut oil which, according to current urban legend, is supposed to make be smarter, faster, stronger . . . and make my coat shiny. I'll let you know how it goes after a fair test, unless I improve so much that I can no longer just sit around and post on my blog.
I don't know if it's just the coconut oil talking, but the walk produced deep thoughts this morning.
Cat, the feral feline that I am attempting to befriend (see last Saturday's post), now graces my picnic table to eat the cat food I put out for him every day. He was standing on the table, eating away, as I came out of the house to start walking this morning. The scrape of the wooden kitchen door sent Cat leaping from the top of the table and hitting the ground running in full cat stride before pulling up at the edge of the woods, turning to watch me with suspicion from afar. I walk laps along a path close to my house. Each lap is 3/8 of a mile, and takes me away from the house for a little while. As I was coming back toward the house at the end of the first lap I noticed Cat was back up on the picnic table, nervously gorging himself on Meow Mix, pausing only briefly to look over his shoulder to make sure no enemy was sneaking up on him. He saw me coming up the hill toward him and once again bolted for the edge of the woods. I walked six laps. The first four laps Cat was eating on the table until he saw me, then he ran. He wasn't there the last two laps. Every morning and evening I make a big production out of putting cat food out for Cat. I say the universal cat whisper "kitty, kitty, kitty . . ." in a falsetto voice, not so quietly that Cat can't hear it if he is close by, but not so loudly as to be annoying. I rattle the Meow Mix bag vigorously as I open it. Then I pour the dry cat food into the metal pan, holding the bag about a foot above the pan, so that the dry nuggets of nutrition bang loudly as the plate is filled. The dinner bell has been rung. I have done this for a week. And still Cat, who sees and hears me perform this ritual for him every day, whom I have never hurt or even raised my voice toward, seems to tolerate me only for the food that I give him, and then only at several arms length. I wonder what happened to Cat before we met that makes him so suspicious of somebody like me?
With the whole Cat thing weighing heavily on me as I plodded along, I heard a noise ahead of me, up in the limbs of a pine tree that arch over my path. I thought it was a squirrel. But it was a pine cone, falling from the top of the tree, pinging and bouncing from limb to limb, like a pinball, until, after grazing the lowest limb, it fell with a crackly crunch to the ground in front of me. Suddenly I noticed there were twenty or thirty pine cones already on the ground under the tree. I've been walking this same route for several days, directly through and over this pile of pine cones, and never noticed them at all on the ground, even as I am sure I stepped on and crushed a few of them. But it was hearing and then watching the one cone fall that directed me to the place and plight of the many silent cones that had always been there. Is is necessary for me to see the wreck before I feel anything for the victims?
Later on, as my path took me through a field, I noticed a curious thing. Actually, the two components of the curious thing were not curious at all, they are both common and annoying. I walked by a fire ant hill. Across the field these red dirt mounds pop up like small volcanoes, and if you have ever become involved with one you understand that the stinging eruption of solenopsis invicta can have almost as much heat as Vesuvius. Trying to get rid of them is like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole . Actually you don't get rid of them, they just pick up and move a little down the road. Then I noticed something in the fire ant hill I was walking by. It was a hole, like a divot, right in the middle of the hill, and a trail of red dirt leading away from the hill through the dewy grass. I had seen this divot before. Several times in my yard. This was the work of an armadillo. At first I laughed out loud in the quiet stillness of the morning. The thought of a pesky armadillo sticking his ugly snout into the middle of a fire ant hill and the resulting painful withdrawal and retreat made me happy. Then, the thought of the fire ant hill being disrupted by the armadillo made me happy again. But then my heart, soul and mind were troubled. What if armadillos develop a taste for fire ants and become their natural predator? What if my enemy, the armadillo, is the answer to my life-long struggle against fire ants? Or what if my nemesis the fire ants are the remedy for armadillo infiltration? When did life become so complicated?
Walking through the dew laden field my shoes and socks became soaked. My steps became heavier and heavier. While I am sure the added weight that I picked up on my journey will make be stronger, it is a slower walk. But maybe that's not such a bad thing.
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