memories

Snakes and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

I’ve carried this snippet of rhyme my entire life. The rhyme was embossed on a sign in our pediatrician’s office in Huntsville [Alabama], illustrated with two cherubic children, plump and pink-cheeked and aggressively binary.

What are little boys made of?
Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails
That's what little boys are made of

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice
That's what little girls are made of

I despised this rhyme. Little boys got all the fun stuff, and I knew, for certain, that sugar and spice and everything nice were NOT what I was made of.1

Photo of me at some early elementary school age, posing for one of my oldest sister’s “Rae with Pets” series. Here I’m showing off our first goat, Sandy, a reddish-brown nanny with a short beard and curved horns.
In this blurry middle-school addition to the “Rae with Pets” series, I’m holding one of our red hens. Mother had forced me into a short haircut, for school, because burrs, ticks, and tangles didn’t flatter our household. When I confessed my longing for a feathered Charlie’s Angels look, Mother countered that Farrah Fawcett did not keep “rat nests” in her hair.

Commuters in paradise

We moved from Huntsville to Fayetteville, Tennessee, when I was three years old. I have no reliable memories of being a city kid, of the house Chapman Street where my siblings had friends next door and walked to school. My memories are 20-odd patchwork acres of fields, woods, pens, and sheds. There was an old barn and an older house, and, by the time I was old enough for memories, there were animals everywhere.

Another “Rae with Pets” photo.2 This time I’m posing with my brother’s beagle, Fella. A small white hen and a large reddish-yellow rooster have wandered into the frame, along with one of our shepherds in the background.

My memories are also long, diesel-fumed bus rides to and from school, longer drives to the grocery, and longer-yet drives to Huntsville. Because, while our parents moved our household to Tennessee, they never really left Alabama.

The tradition of commuting to Huntsville permeated our life. My oldest brother, 13+ years older than me, finished high school as a commuter student in Huntsville.3 Our father commuted to his bookkeeping and financial analyst jobs for a succession of space industry corporations in Huntsville. We commuted to dog training classes, company picnics, shopping excursions, and dental appointments. And, every time someone got sick, we commuted to the pediatrician’s office.

With five kids spanning the entire realm of K-12, we got sick a lot.

Photo of Mother’s hatchback Toyota Corolla, which logged more than 200 thousand miles before its odometer broke. Before the Corolla there was a maroon Buick Skylark and a classic two-toned station wagon (and probably more I don’t remember). All the cars smelled like migraines, like hot plastic and Mother’s perfume with notes of mildew, ragweed, and gasoline.

I always arrived at the pediatrician in the grip of fever, nausea, and a miserable headache induced by mother’s perfume, a 1970s favorite called Charlie. (Mother “got dressed” for trips to the pediatrician. Thus, Charlie.) The drive took about forty-five minutes each way, long enough to make me car sick on top of whatever ailment prompted the commute.4

And there, in the pediatrician’s office, were those insipid caricatures of binary gender. The little boys, with permission to own everything fun in the world. And the little girls, who owned only dresses and aprons and recipes.

Have mercy.

Photo of three very young kittens–one black-and-white, one ginger-and-white, one solid black–huddled together in our front yard. Unless Mother explicitly declared it otherwise, every kitten and cat on our property was mine, mine, mine. Mine to love and spoil and carry in my pockets or down my shirt front or on my shoulder and in my hair. Mine to name and cry over when they were sent away to other homes or died in one of the many tragedies that claim kittens’ lives in rural Tennessee. (The green bicycle in the background was a hand-me-down affair that I was allowed to ride but not own. I can still hear, today, the rattle of its loose fenders and kickstand as I wheezed up and down our gravel driveway.)

Owning too much and too little

Our household was a manifestation of parental dissonance. Mother lived as if entrenched in poverty, while Daddy lived as if money came easy. Both had their reasons.

Daddy worked hard and liked investing in the things he enjoyed. He was a master marksman who bought and sold custom-sighted guns.5 We had aquariums in every room, a citizens’ band radio (CB) in every car, a Pong game, and an Atari. These photos exist because we had cameras, film, and an account with the processing lab. Daddy also collected purebred dogs and carried us to obedience trials, most weekends, so the dogs could earn titles. We had beagles, Shetland sheepdogs, German shepherds, and a collie. My oldest sister had a teacup toy poodle. My middle sister had a Siberian husky.6

Photo of elementary-school me hugging my father’s Shetland sheepdog, Chisterling’s Dixie Clipper (aka BlackJack or BJ), at a 1970s-era outdoor dog show. I’m sporting a bowl-like haircut and home-sewn clothes: a red hooded shirt and houndstooth-patterned pants. BJ’s red leash matches my red shirt and the red second-place ribbon he earned.7

Mother worked hard, too, scrimping and saving and stretching each penny thin. She fed us from the garden, chicken house, and pasture: eggs and tomatoes, okra and beans, chickens she killed and cleaned and plucked, beef Daddy carried to the butcher. She also fed us squirrels and rabbits, when Daddy and/or our brothers hunted, and free government cheese and butter. We had two freezers full of ice-crusted mysteries in tin foil and plastic. She sewed the vast majority of our clothes from clearance bolts of fabric and carefully preserved Simplicity patterns, tsking over mentions of name brands and tutting over complaints about uncomfortably tight cuts that saved precious inches of material.

In short, I grew up in a household of competing parental personalities that reinforced the pediatrician’s binary rhyme, surrounded by Daddy’s largesse and Mother’s frugal home-making.

There was a singular exception to the tension. Both of our parents loved books and vinyl albums, so much so that we had shelves and shelves and shelves, in every room. (We went to the library a lot, but also to used book stores and the sale racks at record shops.)

Photo of elementary-aged me sitting on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my middle sister until our second-oldest brother moved out. I’m petting Daddy’s favorite sheltie, Mac’s Best of Love (aka Bess). The background is cluttered with bunk beds and metal shelving piled high with board games, books, and vinyl story albums.

Thereby Hangs a Tale

My favorite album was and still is Eddy Arnold’s Thereby Hangs a Tale. And, when I was in fifth grade, my love for Eddy Arnold sparked a battle with the pediatrician’s rhyme.

Photo of my two copies of Thereby Hangs a Tale. The first copy was worn almost to dust when Mother chanced on a second copy, long after I was an adult, at Huntsville’s Lowe Mill ARTS and Entertainment facility.

My fifth grade teacher decided our classroom theme, for that year’s Harvest Festival, would be Urban Cowboy. A genuine faux honky-tonk. For a small fee, parents and other visitors to the Harvest Festival could admire our straw bale decorations, enter a raffle to win a real calf (which was penned into a corner of the classroom), and enjoy the spectacle of kids in country-and-western costumes lip syncing our favorite songs.

Photo of fifth-grade me coveting a half-grown Holstein calf that was penned in a corner of our classroom during Harvest Festival. I’m wearing costume vest and chaps (which Mother had made, some years earlier, for my middle sister) over jeans and a white shirt I had already outgrown. A small felt costume cowboy hat hangs on my back.

When the theme was introduced, I knew EXACTLY which song I would perform. Eddy Arnold’s version of Ghost Riders in the Sky. Who needs three Christmas ghosts when you can have a herd of the devil’s cows, chased by the Inferno’s cowboys? I knew every nuance of that song, every change of minor key. It was bound to be a crowd pleaser. (If you haven’t heard it, get thee hence to the internet and listen. I’ll wait…)

Back already? Okay, on with my tale…

The combined and somewhat horrified NO! from Mother and my teacher stopped me short. But okay, if they thought the ghost riders were too much horror for the room, how about the location-friendly Tennessee Stud, from the same album? Nope.

No also to Wreck of the Old 97, to Boot Hill and to Nellie Sits A’Waitin’ and to Tom Dooley and to The Red-Headed Stranger. No to all of them. When I finally got around to asking why, I was floored by the answer.

Eddy Arnold’s voice was a man’s voice. I was a girl.

But I wouldn’t actually be singing, so why did the voice matter? Even if I bowed to Mother’s choice and went with Teresa Brewer, surely no one in the audience would think I actually sang like Teresa Brewer? The conversation turned hostile at that point, on all sides. I declared it was Eddy Arnold or nothing. Mother declared it was Teresa Brewer or else. My teacher declared he had better things to do than explain to me what should already be obvious.

I wasn’t even allowed to resign with my dignity intact, to join my classmates who had opted out of performing. Mother knotted me into my sister’s too-small costume and yanked me up hard when I dared complain, again, about the injustice of it all.

Photo of fifth-grade me doing my best to avoid Mother’s ire as I lip sync Teresa Brewer’s Music! Music! Music!. My most prominent memories from the night are that my clothes were too tight, my sister was mad because I wore her costume, and Mother wanted me to stay within arm’s reach in case I needed another physical reminder that I was a kid and she was an adult. (I did, in fact, receive a number of these reminders as the night wore on. Whether I needed them or not remains up for discussion.)

Memories being what they are, this retelling isn’t accurate. But it’s accurate enough, because the memory isn’t the point. The ensuing years are the point, the escalating Mother-Daughter War. All of the mutual disdain and despair over my clothes and my hair and my aspirations and my hard-headed determination to shun the sugar and spice, the everything nice I was meant to embody, in favor of the snakes and snails and puppy dog tails that were reserved for boys.

Photo of a cottonmouth snake (aka water moccasin). This zoom photo of the cottonmouth’s head shows its vertical “cat’s eye” pupil and heat-sensing pit (between eye and nostril). As a snake-loving girl I learned to spot these distinctive signs of the pit viper family, venomous snakes that shared the habitats I enjoyed exploring. This photo was taken in 2021 at Back Bay Wildlife Refuge, because I still enjoy exploring habitats shared by snakes.

In the part of me that cherishes Mother’s memory, I sympathize with her quest to pave me a feminine path in the world. In the part of me that still chafes from the strain, I regret the energy she invested in shoving me toward her ideal of feminine, while I defiantly shoved back. It was exhausting for both of us.

All because I was assigned female at birth

When it comes to gender, doctors get to make the call. As Kate Bornstein explains:

In most cultures, we’re assigned a gender at birth–and once you’ve been assigned a gender, that’s what you are and always will be. For the most part, it’s doctors who dole out the gender assignments, which shows you how emphatically gender has been medicalized. These doctors look down at a newly born infant and say, ‘It has a penis, it’s a boy.’ Or they say, ‘It doesn’t have a penis, it’s a girl.’ It has little or nothing to do with vulvas or vaginas, let alone DNA, hormones, or dozens of other nuances of biological sex. It’s all penises or no penises: gender assignment is both phallocentric and genital. Other cultures are not or have not been so rigid.

Kate Bornstein in Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Chapter 4, Section 2, paragraph 1)

I was assigned female at birth, and I was pretty much okay with that assignment, on the surface. At least, I didn’t question or resent what being female meant about my body.8 What I questioned and resented were the societal (and maternal) expectations around my gender, the insistence that sugar and spice and everything nice should be all I needed or wanted to be.

Have mercy, indeed.

Photo of me as an awkward teenager with a vague hairstyle featuring short, feathered bangs and sides and mullet-like length in the back. I had huge glasses and orthodontic braces. I’m wearing that summer’s favorite long pink T-shirt, a dainty necklace and bracelet, and I’m showing off a king snake I had caught.

I wanted to be made of the tracks wildlife left in the woods. Of horses and goats and cows. Of kitten whiskers and, yes, puppy dog tails. Of snakes and salamanders, weeds and creeks, storms and katydids, stories and books. I read Henry and Ribsy and wanted to be Henry. I read The Black Stallion and wanted to be Alex. I read Where the Red Fern Grows and wanted a pair of hounds so badly I could feel their sleek presence in my dreams.

Photo of my foxhound Sarah. Sarah was the first dog I could call my very own. A friend gifted her to me from a beautiful litter of puppies. I was in college at the time, and I loved Sarah fiercely. I imagined, years ahead, taking her everywhere with me. She died before she was a year old, lost to a careless early morning moment when she got on the road.
Photo of college-age me with my Yorkshire Terrier, Angel. Here, both of us are fresh from cleaning up after some muddy excursion outside. A family friend had show dogs, and, after Sarah died, he gave me Angel. Around one year old at the time, Angel had not done well in shows. For many happy years, Angel did go everywhere with me, usually in my oversized purse.

But I also read The Witch of Blackbird Pond (I wanted to be both Kit and Hannah). And Nancy Drew (I wanted to be George). And the Dragonriders of Pern series (I wanted to be both Menolly and Jaxom). An obscure favorite called Horse in the House by William Corbin (I desperately wanted to be Melly). Even Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (I wanted to be Izzy) hinted that female didn’t have to mean sugar and spice and everything nice.

Photo of young adult me, finally free of the Mother-Daughter Wars, with my pet rat Izzy riding on my shoulder. Izzy was a hooded rat, rescued from the feeder cage of a pet store for $1.50. She had an aquarium-cage in my room, but she liked to ride on my shoulder and play in my hair. It seems Mother was right all along. As soon as I achieved Farrah-length hair, I kept a rat nest in it.

And then I got a chance to define myself

As long as we lived in a stable household, the Mother-Daughter Wars slogged on. Even a few years longer, after the household deteriorated into instability and poverty (the exact poverty she had always anticipated, it seemed), battles would flare. Mother continued her siege of demand and reprimand. I continued my resistance of hide and defy. She told me that my sisters, at least, made the effort. She was correct. They did. I didn’t.

I don’t know how our war would have turned out, had the household remained stable. But our father left, remarried, refused to pay alimony, and changed the life insurance to his new wife’s name mere months before he died. I was fifteen when he died, when Mother caved to the grief that had plagued her since Daddy left and told me she was too tired to raise me anymore. If I needed anything, I should ask my older sisters, and if I didn’t need anything I should simply stay out of the way.

I had outlasted the siege. I was free to dash off into the woods in any spare moment, to read as much as I liked (and as late as I liked, tucked tight under as many cats and dogs as could fit on my bed), to cook and sew only well enough to suit myself, and to wear yesterday’s muddy torn clothes to school if I wanted. It was a lonely relief, but at least it was relief.

In fact, my affinity for snakes and snails and puppy dog tails proved useful.

After Mother shook off her grief and began building a new life, she resumed morning pet duty: putting the dogs into their pens each morning, feeding and watering while I dressed for school. Otherwise I took care of the outside pets. The dogs and I, and whatever cats felt like tagging along, went for long rambles each afternoon. I pulled burrs, brushed or cut out all of our matts, plucked ticks, and watched for signs of injuries or illness. I fed and watered each evening and escorted the dogs to their assigned crates at night. I chased the goats off of the cars and back into their pen, when they broke out or were released for an afternoon, and watched over deliveries of the twin and triplet baby goats that arrived each spring. I emptied and refilled the wading pools that our ducks and geese fouled each day.

Because I was outside anyway, I stacked wood and mowed the yard and helped my oldest sister in the garden. Wielding an old slingblade, I beat back tangles of honeysuckle and stands of ragweed that encroached on the yard. I carried snakes away from the porch, climbed the roof to clean the chimney, and braved the spidery attic to fetch and re-stash boxes. I liked best the dirty jobs, and Mother was content to let me do them. It turns out that, when there’s no man about, girls might need to be more than sugar and spice and everything nice.

Photo of college-age me with long untidy hair pulled back under a folded bandana. I’m at the kitchen counter, preparing a meal, and there’s a tortoiseshell kitten on my shoulder.

Between fifteen and twenty-three, I reveled in the freedom I had gained through loss. I graduated high school, and, when I gained control of my own bank account (where Mother had deposited every 4-H prize check I had ever earned) at age 18, I emptied the account to buy a $600 car from my oldest sister’s boyfriend. My middle sister gave me a few unenthusiastic driving lessons, and suddenly I could get myself back and forth to everywhere without begging a ride from sisters and friends. I talked the local veterinarian into hiring me, worked two additional part-time jobs, and did well enough in college to keep the full scholarship I had earned with high standardized test scores. (My test scores did not reflect any particular proficiency or aptitude. I simply had a knack for standardized tests, which played to my strengths of reading, creative puzzle solving in quiet rooms, and informed guesswork when encountering the unknown.)

Year by year, I grew up and moved on. When I finished my bachelor’s degree in biology, I faced a happy pair of choices: should I pursue my snakes and snails onto a biology research path, or should I follow the puppy dog tails into veterinary school? I chose the puppy dog tails. (I won’t claim to have never regretted that choice. Regret is one of my lifelong habits.)

The rhyme stayed with me

I lived in a dorm over the university veterinary clinics, in Knoxville, where I stayed too busy to stew over a childhood rhyme. But the rhyme still surfaced occasionally. Particularly when The Spice Girls were popular. Which was about the same time that I met my rescue tabby, Spice.

Photo of Spice in my dorm. She is standing, front feet braced on the long windowsill that doubled as a bookshelf, peering out of my window over the receiving area for the large animal clinic. She’s wearing a bandage over her shoulders, covering the scabs that prompted someone to drop her off at the small animal clinic as a wounded stray.

The older I got, the less I pondered that rhyme on the pediatrician’s wall. Until recent years. Now I find almost daily reminders of the Mother-Daughter War, of my escape through loss from Mother’s version of female tradition. Of my bittersweet dash away from the siege, toward a future filled with snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.

What if I was a kid again, today? That same kid? Would I be able to make the same escape? I worry that my escape was a fluke, a privileged path through a brief convergence of opportunities.9 I worry the future is closing, not opening. Especially for kids who experience a deeper unease, who yearn not just for the other side of the rhyme, but an altogether different definition of gender. I never questioned or resented the gender a delivery room obstetrician assigned me at birth. But what of the kids who did and do?

My memories should stand as old-fashioned artifacts of bygone times. Instead, new generations are experiencing new traumas, inflicted by the polarizing lenses of binary, cisgender ideologies.

What is the deal with gender, anyway?

I’ve yet to find a satisfactory definition of gender. I’m drawn to a quote by Ian Hacking, which wasn’t meant to address gender but seems to fit. Hacking’s words strike a particularly interesting chord, for me, when paired with a quote about capitalism:

High-level semantical words like ‘fact,’ ‘real,’ ‘true,’ and ‘knowledge’ are tricky. Their definitions, being prone to vicious circles, embarrass the makers of dictionaries. These words work at a different level from that of words for ideas or words for objects. For brevity I have called them elevator words. They are used to say something about what we say about the world. Facts, truths, knowledge, and reality are not in the world like protozoa, or being in love. Philosophers keep on fussing with them.

Ian Hacking in The Social Construction of What? (p. 80)

Social theory is often likened to lenses of various cuts that enable us to discern patterns in human action. When the lenses are cut solely to confirm one’s faith and denounce whatever opposes it, the resulting vision is strictly ideological. Such lenses, commonly worn in politics and public debating, function more like blinders.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun in “Getting Real”, the collective conclusion to Does Capitalism Have a Future?

While my experiences and expectations regarding the word gender continue to grow and change, while I claw at my own blinders, I’ve settled into a tentative personal understanding along these lines:

  1. If gender is a genuine trait (that’s a big if), then
  2. it must follow that gender varies, because all traits vary, and
  3. these variations should manifest between a set of extremes
  4. with the vast majority of individuals situated between, rather than at, the extremes.

If gender is a “real” trait, or even a socially constructed one, my experience shouldn’t be unique. In fact, I should be one of the majority who experience our binary-constrained society somewhere between the extremes. And I believe this is the case. I’m clearly not the only girl who despised that dratted rhyme, who dreaded a lifetime of sugar and spice while yearning for snakes and snails. (Nor am I the only girl released from her Mother-Daughter War by household trauma.) None of these constraints were, or are, necessary. A world of binary gender expectations isn’t necessary.

Which is why I wrote this long blog post

It’s worth repeating: My memories should stand as old-fashioned artifacts of bygone times. Instead, new generations are experiencing new traumas, inflicted by the polarizing lenses of binary, cisgender ideologies.

Let me be clear, my years in the Mother-Daughter War are petty spats compared to the abuses endured by many cis women, trans women, and non-binary people. I do not wish to usurp the stories of feminist, trans, and non-binary activists, nor draw attention away from their long struggle. I’ve benefitted from the work of feminist activists, in particular, and I’m grateful. I’ve learned from trans and non-binary advocates and activists, and I’m grateful. I owe my education(s) and career(s) to those who have done the heavy work of changing the world. I’m grateful.

I’m not equipped, emotionally, for a life of activism. But I have a small platform, a great deal of unearned privilege, and a history that seems pertinent to the moment. So I wrote this long blog post. I wrote with the hope that my story might help some mother, somewhere, call a cease-fire in her own Mother-Daughter War and decide, instead, to explore the beautiful territories and rich opportunities between the binaries.

Photo from near the top of our terraced pasture after a brief snowfall. Tire tracks are visible, left by a neighbor’s tractor. A single round bale of hay awaits collection. The neighbor cut and baled the pasture in exchange for all but one or two bales of hay, which we kept for the goats.
Photo from inside “my” boggy acres of Tennessee woods, during winter. There is a thick layer of dead leaves, several nurse logs (downed by a past tornado), and a rich growth of saplings in the tornado-cut spaces. This place was my refuge and heart-home, during my youth and young adult years. I loved these pieces of land as well as I’ve ever loved anyone or anything. They sheltered me through a series of undiagnosed and untreated depressions, and their memory shelters me still.

Notes

1. Please don’t read this to mean that I harbor any resentment against children and adults who are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I grew up with several wonderfully contented sugar and spice and everything nice people, and I’ve met more as an adult. I simply knew, from my earliest knowing, that I was more of a snakes and snails and puppy dog tails kind of person. (click here to return)

2. This photo dates from a mid-elementary-school age. As it was clearly summer, Mother had slackened some of her standards regarding my hair, which is tousled in odd lengths as it recovers from one of the short haircuts. As for the striped halter top and yellow shorts, I inherited some dozen of each as hand-me-downs from my older sisters. Mother sewed them in bulk. (click here to return)

3. Later, my sisters and I commuted to our undergraduate degrees from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I even continued the tradition, for a few years, after moving to Knoxville for veterinary school. Whenever I had a non-working weekend, I commuted four hours “home” to mow the yard or stack wood or mend fences or simply wander the fields and woods until it was time to drive four hours back. The years after I ceased commuting, when I declared somewhere else home, were fraught. Mother resisted and resented my decision to make only infrequent visits. She complained about having to pay someone to mow, about the expense of central heating with no one to stack the wood, and about loneliness. Loneliness, I now understand, was the real issue. I was the youngest child and the last to leave, so I was the one who left her alone. Our mutual insistence on misunderstanding each other’s motivations eventually led to a decade-long breach that never quite healed. (Readers might sense, here, an unhealthy dose of mother-daughter strain. It’s a common enough family dynamic. Read on for more.) (click here to return)

4. Mother probably detested the drive as much as I did, though not enough to transfer our care to one of the family doctors in Fayetteville. And her hard-and-fast rule held that if I was sick enough to miss school (with an undeniable fever and/or vomiting, which were the only acceptable excuses) I was sick enough to see the doctor. (click here to return)

5. Daddy also saved spent brass and reloaded it himself. (click here to return)

6. I was nearing old enough, deemed to be 11 years old for me, when our parents’ marriage fell apart. Daddy had even shopped a bit, with me, for dalmatian puppies. I had read the book at least 101 times. (click here to return)

7. Daddy purchased BJ from a “show quality” litter. I suppose the dream was to expand into the conformation side of AKC shows. To finish a championship and, perhaps, to establish a lineage of champions. (Our father often dreamed big.) But BJ stopped growing just short of breed standard height. He was undersized, a career-ending flaw. Daddy entered him a few times, anyway, bluffing toward standard height with floofy grooming techniques. They even earned a few ribbons and points. But finishing a championship was never a realistic goal. Besides being undersized, BJ was a snappy fellow (stop judging!). He failed many a temperament test, never thrived in the obedience ring, and lived out his life as a grumpy little ornament on our untidy acres. He was Daddy’s dog, but I loved him and he loved me back and we spent many afternoons exploring together. (Especially after Daddy left.) Then many uncomfortable evenings pulling tangles and burrs from our hair. (click here to return)

8. Except that I feared all the ways that my uterus could and did destabilize my life. I’m bookmarking this thought, here, in hopes of expanding it into a separate post, later. (click here to return)

9. I don’t mean to overlook the bizarre irony of seeing my father’s desertion and death, my mother’s exhaustion and grief, as opportunity. There’s a profound dysfunction in my perception of these memories that mirrors the various dysfunctions our family navigated, during those years. (click here to return)

References

Bornstein, K. (2016). Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. (2nd edition, Kindle edition). Vintage Books.

Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? (3rd printing). Harvard University Press.

Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derluguian, G., & Calhoun, C. (2013). Does capitalism have a future? (Kindle edition). Oxford University Press.

I have been saving links to essays and stories more interesting and more important than my musings, but this post is already too long. If you’ve stayed and read to the end, I very much appreciate your attention and time. I’ll add the links to a later (shorter) post.

Finding What I Wasn’t Looking For

Rae Spencer17 Comments

(Originally published April 30, 2012)

Macro photograph of a small plant with pointed leaves and three light-purple flowers. Each flower has four petals and four prominent stamens.

In trying to capture this weed (which I believe might be field madder), I’ve committed every possible photography blunder. Over the past few weeks, I’ve discarded images that were blurry, poorly lit, overwhelmed by background clutter, too distant, too close, blocked by a sleeve or the camera strap… the list goes on. I almost gave up.

Since today began as a failure day, marred by oversleep, bookkeeping errors, and lost office supplies, I decided to try again. What harm could come from adding one more frustration?

Instead of frustration, I found a moment of complete peace. This four-leaf clover, growing beside a patch of madder, felt like a visit from my mother.

Macro photograph of a four-leafed clover surrounded by blades of grass and other indistinct greenery.

One of Mother’s many talents was an affinity for four-leaf clovers. From her chair on the porch, glass of iced tea in hand, she’d point to a spot across the driveway. My siblings and I would follow her directions and retrieve the prize. Walking into the pediatrician’s office, she’d pause near the sidewalk, then laugh as we groaned over her obsession. Getting out of her car at school, she’d drop a book, reach to pick it up, and find a four-leaf clover growing through a crack in the pavement

I did not inherit this particular skill. Four-leaf clovers are vanishingly rare for me, so today’s find felt as if Mother must have been looking over my shoulder. The sensation doubled when I found a second one.

Macro photograph of a second four-leafed clover surrounded by blades of grass and other indistinct greenery.

In August of last year, Mother was involved in a serious car accident. She died in October. As we emptied her house, day after day of sorting memories and treasures and curious little mysteries, we found four-leaf clovers everywhere. Saved in envelopes, filed with old bills, stuffed in drawers and cabinets, sprinkled across shelves. Even pressed in the pages of her Bible.

Photograph of a dried four-leaf clover, pressed between the pages of one of Mother’s Bibles.

The house cried four-leaf clovers, orphaned keepsakes sifting from every crevice. A lifetime’s worth and more. So many that I felt no urge to pick today’s pair, though I was very grateful to have found them. I hovered a while, happy as I’ve been in months. Then I took my pictures, said another goodbye, and left Mother’s four-leaf clovers in the yard.

The Unwild Mallards

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Each spring, our semi-wild population of suburb mallards leave their lakes, ponds, and canals in search of private nesting habitats. This local migration often brings pairs of mallards to the yard, though none have stayed to nest. Until this year.

In this photo, taken April 29, five baby mallards huddle under their mother as she stands on a rock beside our pond. A sixth baby sits on the next rock over. These mallard ducklings were less than 18 hours out of the egg and are only half of the clutch. Six more babies were waiting in the nest behind their siblings.

Less than a week after I posted about the dragonfly pond, a pair of mallards arrived and began redecorating the pond. They shoved rocks from the border, collapsed minnow caves, uprooted plants, stirred sediment into columns of mud, and added enough nutrient (in the form of duck poop) to start a massive algae bloom.

In this photo, taken March 3, a pair of semi-wild mallards visit the pond. The male mallard floats near the center of the pond, preening his wings, while the female searches for underwater food. The water is still relatively clear and the pond‘s rocks and plants are still somewhat in place.
This photo, taken March 7, shows the view from our kitchen window as the mallards nap in the pond. Both ducks have their heads resting along their backs, beaks tucked into the feathers between their wings. The water is turbid and dark, with scattered remnants of uprooted plants. The rocks are still mostly in place, though that didn’t last.
Photo of the pond, taken March 14, showing filthy greenish-brown water. The pond heater is still deployed, though I removed it shortly after. A board shaped like a fish floats in the far end of the pond.1

The dragonfly pond soon looked and smelled like a cattle pond.

The ducks ate everything they could catch in the water. Minnows and dragonfly larvae, damselfly larvae and snails. Anything that swam or wriggled.2

We shooed and herded the pond-wrecking mallards, who returned day after day for further wreckage. I complained to family and friends about the mallards’ destructive invasion, but I also hoped for a nest. Truth be told, I always hope for nests. Plus, I have nostalgic affection for ducks.

This photo3 shows me at some early elementary school age, complete with crooked bangs, ill-fitting shorts and halter top, knobby knees, and a welter of mosquito bites. I’m holding our pet duck Fred, who was very spoiled.
This photo, dated 1975, shows a group of mature white ducks in our Tennessee back yard.
In this later photo, probably late 1980s, three white geese and two black-and-white ducks amble past a newly delivered cord of winter wood in our Tennessee yard.4
This photo, dating to the late 1980s or early 1990s, shows three white geese, two black-and-white ducks, and three white ducks visiting their blue plastic wading pool in our Tennessee back yard.5

Hoping to lure the mallards away from the pond for at least a few hours each day, I purchased a blue plastic wading pool (definitely a theme in my lifelong efforts to keep waterfowl happy) and an extra bag of wild bird feed. Pool and feed in hand, I set up a duck station near the fence in our Virginia back yard, including steps for easy entry into the pool. Then I herded the mallards out of the pond and toward the pool.

In this photo from March 12, a blue plastic wading pool is wedged into the back seat of my car. Many thanks to the very patient Target employee who brought the wading pool out for curbside pickup and helped load it while we both fought off fits of the giggles because who buys a wading pool in March? For ducks? While masking and social distancing because COVID is not over? (I’ll add that COVID is still not over. Especially for families, like mine, who have immunocompromised households.)

Not surprisingly, the mallards saw peril in the duck station and refused to try the wading pool. At that point, the pair were still semi-wild, after all. They retreated into the pollinator beds and rummaged through duff when I was in the yard, then circled back to the pond when I went inside.

And the pond grew more and more fetid. (I had almost forgotten the smell of our chicken house in Tennessee, and sometimes the yard when our flocks grew too populous, but now I’ve been reminded.)

In this photo from March 14, the male mallard watches warily from behind the irises that shore up one end of the pond. Neither of the mallards tried the wading pool until after I quit trying to convince them to try the wading pool.

When the female mallard built her nest in the irises and began laying, we stopped all efforts to shoo or herd or otherwise interfere. Almost immediately, the mallards took to the wading pool for luxurious sessions of bathing and splashing.

Photo from March 21, showing the female mallard bathing in the wading pool as the male mallard stands guard.
Photo, dated April 14, showing the female mallard bathing in the wading pool as the male mallard stands guard.
Photo, dated April 18, showing both mallards in the wading pool.

Resigned to a lengthy mallard residency, we invested in a pump and filter for the pond. For the next month, I cleaned the pond filter daily, dumped and refilled the wading pool every other day, put out feed each morning and evening, and lingered in the kitchen window for hours on end, watching. The mallards hunted in the pond (and further rearranged the rocks), bathed and basked in the wading pool, ate their feed and grazed through the yard, and generally unwilded until they were as comfortable in the yard as our domestic flocks had been in the yard of my childhood home.

And while the mallards unwilded, the nest grew.

Photo, dated March 20, of the nest with a single egg.
Photo, dated March 28, of the nest with five eggs.
Photo, dated April 1, of the nest with nine eggs.

On April 1, with nine eggs in the nest, the female mallard settled to incubating. Giving up all pretense of productivity, I sat in the kitchen window, day after day. While she sat on her nest. Day after day.

Photo, dated April 14, of the female mallard on her nest.
Photo, dated April 18, of the eggs nestled in layers of down.
Photo, dated April 18, of the female mallard on her nest.

And then, on April 28, the hatching commenced. All afternoon the mallard fidgeted and turned and tended, eating some of the discarded shells and membranes, tucking the rest under the nest’s foundation of dried grasses. By nightfall the nest was filled with ducklings instead of eggs.

In this photo, taken April 28, a freshly hatched mallard is nestled deep into the downy feathers lining the nest. The female mallard is half-standing in the nest, with two still-unhatched eggs visible beneath her.
Here a duckling, still damp from hatching, is just visible under the female mallard as she stands in her nest.
Here the ducklings are getting their first views of the world from inside their nest, still guarded by their mother.

I set my alarm for sunrise the next morning, certain that the female mallard would lead her brood away as soon as the hatchlings were mobile enough. I didn’t want to miss a moment of their brief stay in the yard.

April 29. The now-fluffy-and-dry baby mallards peer out from around their mother as the little family begins to stir in their nest.
The baby mallards follow their mother from the nest for their first outing. In this photo, two babies hover under their mother as she stands on the rocks just in front of the nest.
All twelve eggs hatched seemingly healthy babies. Their first clamber down the rocks was eager for some and timid for others. In this photo, one of the eager ducklings takes an awkwardly long step down from the first rock.
The eager duckling from the previous photo experiences a bit of a rough landing in the water. The impromptu dive didn’t phase the duckling, which swam busily away.
The more timid ducklings took more care climbing down from the nest. In this photo, a group of three ducklings linger on the first rock as one of their siblings stretches a careful foot down toward the next step.
The ducklings tasted everything they found. Here, a baby mallard floats on the pond and nibbles at a long plant stem.
The fish-shaped board proved a popular resting spot for the ducklings as they practiced swimming and diving and eating. Here, two ducklings perch on the board while their siblings swim around them. The female mallard is just visible in frame, keeping an eye on her brood.
The ducklings also rested on the pond’s bordering rocks, which were warm from the sun. Here, four ducklings sit on the warm rocks.
A baby mallard, less than 24 hours out of the egg, perches on one of the warm rocks bordering our small dragonfly pond.
Exhausted after their first few swim lessons, the mallard family returned to their nest between adventures. Here, two of the babies have tipped over into awkward sleeping positions on the rocks while their siblings gather in the nest beneath the female mallard.

And, of course, they didn’t stay.

I followed the mallards as their mother led them out of the yard and down our street and through a playground and up the next street over to a house on a canal without a fenced back yard. The homeowner was working in his yard when our odd parade arrived, and he nodded and shrugged when I waved from the sidewalk across the street. He told me that mallard mothers lead their brood through his yard, the only unfenced yard along the canal, all spring long. They head for the canal despite its dangerous populations of snapping turtles, snakes, and bullfrogs large enough to eat a baby duck. We agreed that yards are safer but mallards need canals.

Then I trudged home alone, wishing for a world both more and less wild.

I was shocked when the mallard led her brood back, that evening. My husband saw them coming up the sidewalk and called for me. The female mallard had guided her dozen day-old ducklings out into the canal and back again, safe and tired. We opened the gate and welcomed them home, pond wreckage forever forgiven as the sleepy family spilled back into their nest.

The next morning they left for good, of course. The yard, for all of its unwild safety, is not meant for mallards. Nor are mallards meant for the yard.

They haven’t returned, and they won’t. At least, not as the same little family that left. But every mallard I see, for all my years to come, will be one of them.

The Unwild Mallards

The unwild mallards were stubborn and messy
Unwily in their need
And the pond was water enough for nesting

An unwild nest
In unwild irises

A quick meal and a bath
Then back to the nest

Days growing longer and hotter
In the unwild yard
With unwild waters

And then
The unwild dozen

That afternoon, they left
Then returned for one last night
Before they left for good

Heading toward the good wild waters
Where unwild mallards might learn
To be wild
Video comprised of still images and iPhone video clips of the mallards’ time in the yard. Text over the images repeats the poem printed above. The audio is a separate recording made in the yard as I edited this video. Traffic noise and wind dominate the audio, but crows and a blue jay make guest appearances.

Footnotes

1 We added the board after removing a commercial floating planter/island. We removed the island because it was ruined, then added the board because we felt sorry for the minnows that had enjoyed hanging out under the island. (Click here to go back.)

2 The ducks were not so efficient as to depopulate the minnows and invertebrates. I’m not certain how anything survived, between the feasting and the fouling, but some survived and carried on. Currently, the pond is teeming with baby minnows and every surface is clumped with snail eggs. (Click here to go back.)

3 This is another of my oldest sister’s “Rae with pets” series of photos, which span years and will likely continue to appear on this blog. In the background, two chickens and our shepherd make guest appearances. (Click here to go back.)

4 After our father left, the job of stacking wood fell to me. Mother purchased cut wood from a neighbor, who unloaded it in a heap. I would sort the wood by size and age, stacking it all in our pole shed. The freshest cuts went at the bottom of the pile (to age/cure) and the aged/cured wood at the top. The largest logs started at the left and the smallest kindling at the right. I even sorted the wood according to Mother’s lore: she believed that the hardest woods (usually hickory and oak) burned long and hot, the softer woods (often maple and hackberry, but sometimes others that I didn’t recognize) burned fast and cool, and the evergreens (pines and the occasional cedar) burned oily and deposited more creosote in the chimney. When bad weather was forecast, I brought days or weeks worth of wood to the porch, where it stayed drier than the shed. But Mother didn’t like keeping wood stacked on the porch because warm air escaping through the door woke the woodpile’s insects, who followed the warm air indoors. (I never had cause to doubt Mother’s wood fire lore and would likely stack wood by size and hardness, away from the porch, if we burned wood for heat today.) (Click here to go back.)

5 The wading pool was the closest thing they had to a pond. A second blue plastic wading pool, visible in the background, was in the dog pen and helped our dogs stay cool. The second pool also kept the dogs from digging under the fence because they wanted to play in water. (Click here to go back.)

I regret that I do not have a list of links, for this post, to articles and essays that are more important and more interesting than the small unfoldings in our small yard. I have been tired, of late, and taking a break from the larger world. I will resume reading and exploring and learning once I have regathered my energy, both emotional and physical. In the meantime, please post links of your own, to articles and essays that have helped you better understand the world. (Please also note that I screen comments.)

The Owl House

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Last summer I hatched a plan to invite screech owls into the yard.

I’m not certain where my current longing for screech owls started. Probably on social media, where many of my middle-age longings start. Perhaps an outbreak of screech owl photos infected my scroll. Or maybe I succumbed to nostalgia. Again.

This is a winter view of my childhood home in Tennessee, dated 1983, as seen from the top of our terraced pasture. Everything looks barren, dilapidated, and somber in this photo. All of the grasses are yellow and brown. The barn’s tin roof is mostly gone, leaving only tall rafters and a single row of rusting tin at the eave. The pole shed visibly leans and its rusting tin roof is peeling back. The yard’s maples have lost their leaves, as have all of the trees in the beaver-made swamp across the road. A thin trail of smoke shows that it was cold enough for the wood-burning stove (our only source of heat) to be lit.
This is a photo of me at some pre-adolescent age of maximum awkwardness, complete with knobby knees, ill-fitting shorts and halter top, and a bad haircut. (All of my ages were/are maximally awkward, complete with knobby knees, ill-fitting clothes, and poorly planned hair.) Here, I’m in our Tennessee yard, posing with a half-grown calico cat for one of my oldest sister’s “Rae with pets” series of photos.

In my childhood home, air conditioning existed but was rarely used. Mother considered our two window units massively luxurious wastes of electricity and only turned them on for company. So all through the long, hot, humid Tennessee summers, I treasured the open window beside my bed.

This is the only image I could find of my bedroom window. The photo shows one end of our gray wood-sided house, but the main visual impact is a heap of splintered branches blown down by an Easter morning tornado in the mid-1980s. The yard is green and slightly overgrown. There are two white-trimmed windows, one (mine) mostly obscured by the downed branches.

My childhood window, open more often than not, let me hear summer in a way I never hear it anymore. Katydids were my favorite singers, but frogs, whippoorwills, and owls made special appearances during their individual busiest weeks of summer.

In the early spring, peeper frogs spawned in the beaver swamp across the road and in the leaky crater that our father had thought would become a pond, when he dug it. (It was a pond after rain, but the ground was too porous for it to be a permanent pond. Most of the year it was a muddy basin cut into the hill above our garden. The rest of the year it was either a shallow pond or a dry pan of cracked red clay.) Later into spring, bullfrogs took over. During the hottest part of summer, whippoorwills called in the field outside my window. In the late summer and fall, barred owls echoed in the woods all around. And through it all, during the whole long length of summer nights too hot for sleep, screech owls hunted the woods and fields and massive maple trees around our house.

This photo shows the view from our back yard. The large maples and overgrown field were nesting, grazing, and hunting grounds for untold numbers of birds and other wildlife. All of this was just outside my childhood window as I lay awake listening to summer each night. In this daytime photo, laundry is on the line, four spoiled goats are approaching the camera, and a trio of white geese are parading through the background. The disheveled pile of old lumber to the right is the remnants of our well-house roof, which was in the process of being replaced.

I’ve never seen or heard a screech owl in Virginia. I know they live here, unheard and unseen in our busy suburb. Most summers, I’m content simply knowing they’re here and don’t need sensory proof of their presence. But last summer I couldn’t shake my longing to hear, maybe to see, my screech owl companions from childhood. So I built a screech owl house.

After browsing the internet, I settled on building plans from Audubon and began shopping for wood. With no access to affordable cedar in a 10″ cut, I settled for untreated pine, which then wanted paint. A few days later, The Owl House was complete. (If you are intrigued enough to look at the plans, you’ll note that I decided not to use hinges on the roof, opting instead to attach the roof with a few screws that can be easily removed when the house needs cleaning. I also added an extra water barrier over the angled rear roof joint, because I couldn’t fit the angle well enough to prevent leaks.)

Photo of The Owl House, which is essentially a wooden box about 10 inches square and 16 inches deep with a slightly sloped roof, a three-inch-diameter entry hole cut near the top in the front, and some quarter-inch ventilation holes. I painted the outside surfaces white with layered leaf impressions in varying shades of blue, tan, and green. The inside surfaces are unpainted, unsanded wood.

We waited until November to hang The Owl House, hoping that the wood rats and squirrels would have settled into other winter nests. We chose a spot about eleven feet off the ground in the back yard’s large pear tree, nestled between three major branches. For the first few weeks I kept careful watch, as if I expected screech owls to materialize, after decades of invisibility, simply because I invited them. After the first weeks, I watched less frequently. So when a January storm destroyed a squirrel’s nest in the front yard, I didn’t notice until much later that the squirrel had relocated into The Owl House.

Photo of an adult gray squirrel peering out of The Owl House.

With only slight screech owl dismay, I named the squirrel Owl and adjusted my expectations. I also adjusted the bird seed mixture to include more of her favorites: shelled and whole peanuts. (I was already buying these for the crows and blue jays.) I soon grew fond of the squirrel’s watchful attention as I filled bird feeders, put out fresh suet and water, and took care of the yard’s limited winter needs.

Photo of a mature gray squirrel peering over the edge of The Owl House’s entry hole.

When we first moved into our home, in 2001, the neighborhood had more rabbits than squirrels. Far more rabbits, to the extent that we rarely saw squirrels at all. But the squirrel-to-rabbit ratio has steadily changed, over the years, and now we have an abundance of squirrels and very few rabbits. While both of these small mammal neighbors are welcome in the yard, I must admit that, after years of watching rabbits, I find the squirrels’ chronic haste a touch overwhelming.

Photo of a gray squirrel sprawled in a pot of newly sprouted milkweed. I start my late summer milkweed in pots because the squirrels dig up and scatter fragile sprouts, whenever I plant directly into the pollinator bed later than spring. Here, one of the squirrels was taking a break from a vigorous (and milkweed crushing) roll in the pot’s cool, damp dirt.

Marie and Duchess find the squirrels’ antics entertaining (if stalking and chattering under their breath can be taken as signs of entertainment, in cat language).

Photo of our cats, Marie and Duchess, watching through the kitchen window as a gray squirrel climbs down the window’s screen. The yard outside is brightly lit by sunshine; the pollinator beds are overflowing with milkweed, fennel, and flowers; and the dragonfly pond has a single water lily bloom.

All winter long, I enjoyed Owl’s active presence in the yard. Then, for a few weeks in March, Owl disappeared. She stopped peering out of The Owl House when I was in the yard, stopped edging down the tree to see if I had added peanuts to the feeder, stopped chasing other squirrels out of the tree. The Owl House was, as far as I could tell without wrestling the ladder over and climbing up to check, abandoned.

Early in April, Owl returned. Thinner and hungrier, but active as ever.

Photo of a gray squirrel poised at the roots of the pear tree. This is Owl, though in real time I identify her more through behavior than her markings, which are the standard gray, brown, and white markings of your average gray squirrel.
Photo of a gray squirrel (Owl herself) in The Owl House’s entry hole. Her head and shoulders are fully out, her right front foot is grasping the edge of the entry hole, and her left front foot is braced against the facing board of The Owl House.

And on April 13, there was extra movement in The Owl House.

Photo of two squirrel kittens peering just over the edge of the entry hole to The Owl House. Both are barely in view, just a foot, nose, and eye for the kitten on the left and a foot and ear for the kitten on the right.
Photo of a squirrel kitten peering out of The Owl House. Its nose and eyes are in view, along with a few toes and the very tip of its tail.

The kittens seemed almost as curious about me as I was about them and popped up to look every time they heard me outside. They became increasingly active, and, while I never caught a photo or video of the action, I could see swirls of activity in The Owl House as the kittens zoomied around inside and fell past the entry hole in wrestling-worthy stunts.

Photo of two squirrel kittens looking out of The Owl House. The kittens are jostling for space, and one has a foot hooked over the other’s nose, attempting to shove it aside.
Photo of two squirrel kittens competing for space in the entry hole of The Owl House. One kitten is head-and shoulders out of the entry hole, front feet clutching the edge for leverage as the other kitten pushes from the side. All that is visible of the second kitten is its nose, mouth, and chin.
Photo of a squirrel kitten with its chin resting on the lip of The Owl House’s entry hole, while a second kitten climbs past overhead. All that is visible of the second kitten is the underside of its chest and a portion of one paw.
Photo of two squirrel kittens competing for space as they watch from The Owl House. Both are somewhat sideways in the entry hole, one looking out from the right side and the second trying to gain more room by locking a paw over the lip of the entry hole.

The kittens looked mature enough to be leaving the box and exploring their world. But they stayed. For days after I imagined they would leave, they lingered. Sometimes just noses in view, sometimes faces and heads. Usually two kittens at a time, but sometimes three.

Photo of two squirrel kittens peering out from The Owl House. A third kitten’s nose is in view.

I don’t know how many kittens there were, in all. I believe only three, but they were so active that four or five kittens might have been taking turns at the entry hole of their increasingly too-small nest box. To borrow a human reference of expression, they often looked bored.

Photo of two squirrel kittens resting against each other as they gaze out of The Owl House. If I saw two children with these expressions and body language, I would guess that they were bored.
Photo of a squirrel kitten gnawing at the lip of the entry hole to The Owl House. Again, if I saw a child staring off into space with a similar expression as they nibbled on something, I would guess they were bored. And probably tired.
Side view photo, through a gap in the pear tree’s leaves, of two squirrel kittens looking out of The Owl House. I wish that I had words to describe their expressions without resorting to anthropomorphism. As it is, I’m left with saying they look a bit bored, a bit tired, and a bit wistful. They were ready to leave the nest.

Owl stayed very close, most of the time. If I went into the yard looking for her, I usually found her either in the box with her kittens or sleeping on a nearby branch.

In this photo, Owl is stretched out on a limb, belly down, with her chin resting on her front paws.
In this photo, taken through a thin curtain of leaves, Owl is stretched out on a branch, belly down. She was asleep (or at least had her eyes closed) as I tried to convince the camera to focus through the leaves, but she roused at the sound of my shutter.
In this photo, Owl had been sleeping with her forelegs draped to either side of a smaller branch well above The Owl House. As usual, she roused when she heard my camera shutter.

Sometimes she climbed over and around The Owl House, when she saw me photographing the kittens. Again resorting to anthropomorphism, she seemed anxious about all the attention, and maybe a touch pleased to show them off to me.

In this photo, Owl is looking at the camera from over the top of The Owl House, and one of the kittens is peeking out through the entry hole.
Here Owl has climbed down one of the large limbs beside The Owl House while one of her kittens looks out from the entry hole.
In this view from the side of The Owl House, Owl is perched behind the nestbox while one of her kittens looks out from the entry hole.

As The Owl House was designed and mounted with screech owls in mind, it wasn’t ideal for the active coming and going of squirrel kittens. With no perch within kitten-reach of the entry hole, the kittens couldn’t exit without a perilous scramble, a prodigious leap, or a blind drop. While I’m certain the kittens were capable of scrambling, leaping, and dropping, as they had been doing all of the above in the confines of the box, they fidgeted at the brink for hours at a time.

Here, one of the kittens leans out of the entry hole to look down and around while a second kitten clambers over its littermate’s back.
In this photo, one of the kittens leans forward, shoulders and forelimbs out of The Owl House, and feels around for some purchase on the front of the nestbox.
Here, one of the kittens leans far out of The Owl House, front foot extended, as it watches Owl climb through the branches in front of and below The Owl House.

On their last evening in The Owl House, the kittens mimicked holding food in their forepaws as they watched Owl eat peanuts.

In this photo, a squirrel kitten leans out of The Owl House and goes through the motions of holding food in its forepaws and chewing as it watches Owl eat peanuts.
In this photo, a squirrel kitten leans out of The Owl House, one foot curled in front of its mouth as if holding on to a tidbit of food while eating. The kittens were watching Owl eat peanuts and seeming to copy her motions.

Owl moved in and out of The Owl House by stretching or leaping across the gap between branch and entry hole, but how could the kittens learn such acrobatics without a reachable perch to practice from? I decided to intervene. (This is one of my known and admitted failings, my penchant for unnecessary rescuing. I expect that any wildlife experts reading this blog will be muttering under their breath, “Why can’t she leave them alone? If she would just leave them alone, they would work it out.”)

We decided to run a long, skinny board across two branches that were each some distance from the nestbox, securing the board at one end so that it couldn’t slip. When we were finished, the board passed, at a slight angle, a few inches below and away from the entry hole. (We intentionally chose a board that was too narrow and lightweight for a cat, or even a hawk.) Owl and the kittens observed our activity with what seemed like only mild anxiety, and we watched to make certain Owl was comfortable coming and going with the board in place. She was, and the kittens immediately began testing the board with their front feet. The light was too low for photos, by then, so I went to bed excited to see what would happen the next morning.

The next morning, they were all gone. Gone from The Owl House, gone from the tree, gone from the yard. I don’t know if this is normal behavior, when squirrel kittens achieve the squirrel equivalent of fledging. Maybe squirrel kittens always leave their nest trees and nest yards on this exact schedule. Maybe the kittens had been coming and going from The Owl House all along, when we weren’t watching, and it was simply time to explore other trees and other yards. Maybe our activity, as we added the board, was simply too much and too close for Owl and her kittens.

A day or two later, Owl was back at the feeder, dashing up the tree to her usual perch when I went out to add more peanuts. She comes twice a day now, morning and evening, scrambling always to her perch when I go to meet her with a handful of peanuts. She’s shown no interest in reclaiming The Owl House. After eating her fill, she leaves the yard by way of the neighbor’s back fence, following the entire length of the fence and disappearing into the next yard over. My hope is that she and the kittens are exploring and mapping the neighborhood as she teaches them how to forage on their own. Maybe the kittens will come with her, some day soon, when she comes for her peanuts.

Photo of Owl perched atop The Owl House as two kittens look out from the entry hole. This photo was taken well before we added the “rescue” board described above.

The story of Owl and her kittens will undoubtedly resurface as nostalgia, in future years. If the past is any guide, time will renovate and revise the story until it is as unforgettable as an open window full of katydids, frogs, and screech owls.

I feel the need to provide an “after” image, as the opening images show my childhood home in disrepair. This is the house a decade later, in 1995. The long single-story house is wood-sided, painted very pale yellow with blue trim around the windows, and has a clean new roof. In this photo there are lots of healthy trees, a freshly mown yard, and plenty of sunshine. The barn and pole shed have been torn down.

As a final note, I admit to naming the kittens, though I couldn’t even count them. They are Sarah and Percy and Bill. If you don’t know why, read the book Owl Babies by Martin Waddell (illustrated by Patrick Benson). Hopefully your library carries this delightful little book. If your library doesn’t have it, try asking them to add it to their shelves!

And if you see Owl’s babies out and about, with or without their Owl mother, now you know their names.

The Cat Eulogies

Rae Spencer9 Comments

Vanna (1999-2016)

When we lost Scamper last spring, we were already in the process of losing Vanna, too. Vanna had been diagnosed with intestinal lymphoma two years earlier, and, after thriving for longer than expected under the excellent care of her veterinarian, she was beginning to lose ground.

Vanna had been my mother’s cat, which undoubtedly contributed to the depth of my attachment. She was a living link to an unrecoverable past.

What’s more, she flourished in Virginia. In Tennessee, among Mother’s four cats, Vanna had been the neurotic one. The reclusive, skittish one, rarely glimpsed by visitors.

In Virginia, she became the dominant personality in our household.

When the cancer finally overwhelmed her, almost exactly a month after we said goodbye to Scamper, I stumbled into another depression.

Our lively household of three cats had been reduced, in a month’s time, to a quiet household of one. I couldn’t write about Vanna’s death. Could barely talk about it.

Within a year we were losing Sabrina, too.

Sabrina (2001-2017)

Sabrina was the sweetest, gentlest cat I’ve ever owned. Perhaps the sweetest and gentlest cat I’ve ever met.

She and Scamper had been rescued, at only a few weeks of age, from a construction site.

She suffered a serious injury at about twelve weeks old, losing one of her eyes and undergoing multiple surgeries to salvage the vision in her other eye. She lived the rest of her life with a slowly advancing cataract, but didn’t seem bothered by her limited vision.

She played and romped through adolescence, survived an episode of liver failure in early middle-age, and settled into her senior years with the same calm serenity she had shown from kittenhood.

I had hoped, of course, that we might have a few more years with her, after losing Scamper and Vanna in such close succession. But in November Sabrina began showing signs of discomfort while defecating, our first hint of the rectal tumor that, while repeatedly testing benign on biopsy, was likely malignant at its core.

By March she was too uncomfortable to continue. So I made yet another last trip to our wonderful vet and said yet another goodbye.

How many goodbyes, now? Four, since starting this blog. Indigo. Scamper. Vanna and Sabrina. Before them, Spice.

Spice (?-2008)

Spice’s years as a feral cat ended in 1994, the moment I saw her huddled in the back of a cage with a vast, scabbed wound covering her neck and shoulders. She nosed forward to sniff my hand, speaking in unmistakable cat-language. My name is Spice, and I’ve been waiting for you.

Spice was my constant companion for fifteen years. We shared a dorm, an apartment, a duplex (with my future husband), and, in her final years, a house in the suburbs.

She taught Sabrina and Scamper how to be cats, and they kept her young longer than time should have allowed.

Losing her closed a door on my twenties and thirties. I would never be twenty or thirty again, and I would never have another cat like Spice.

All those that came before

Before Spice? The list is long, stretching through memory into the hazy nostalgia of childhood. Mischief and Jackson. Diana. Gizmo and Annie. Morgan and Shere Khan. Sadie and Daisy. Sheena and Poppy. (This list is far from complete, and includes none of the dogs. I’ll save dogs for a later post.)

Many of our cats were named for characters in books and movies. Some came to us already named, relinquished by owners who could no longer keep them, owners who were happy to let an eager young vet assistant adopt the cats they were losing to eviction, a family illness, or one of life’s other jarring turns.

Some of the cats materialized out of thin air, simply showing up in the yard. Others were dumped on the driveway, plucked from parking lots, and chased down in ditches by a trio of sisters who found it biologically impossible to just keep driving. Mother simply sighed and made room for them all, a tide of cats drifting in and out of our lives, in and out of the house each morning and night.

They were never all in the house at the same time, thankfully. Most preferred the yard, sheds, and pasture, most of the time.

 

Cats have been one of the few constants in my life. They’ve shared all of my memories, every place I’ve ever called home, and almost every job I’ve ever had. I don’t know how to be without cats. In the end, loving cats is part of how I love myself. So…

Meet Duchess and Marie

Cat Team 7 is a local rescue group who work primarily with cats living at Naval Station Norfolk. The majority of their mission involves a Trap-Neuter-Relocate program, but they sometimes have adoptable kittens.

Duchess and Marie (two of a group named for the Aristocats) were trapped in a warehouse in early June, along with two male kittens about the same age. I saw their photo on social media, contacted Cat Team 7, and the rest is happy history.

They were quite shy, in their first weeks here.

Duchess (or Dutch, because sometimes she’s more Killjoy than Aristocat)

Marie (just Marie, because it fits)

It didn’t take them long to settle in. They have plenty of windows, soft beds, toys, and treats.

They are closely bonded, more dependent on each other than Sabrina and Scamper were. They’re rarely apart.

(Except when Marie plays fetch. Dutch, who has no interest in fetching, stalks the action until she can tempt Marie into a thunderous, romping game of chase.)

And me? I’m sharing my life with cats again. That’s enough for now.

 

Recommended reading about topics that are more urgent and more important than my cat memories:

Finally, here are three of my favorite recently-read books. Have you read them? What did you think?

Poetry: Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? by Shonda Buchanan

Fiction: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Non-fiction: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman (I haven’t finished this one yet, but it’s already one of the best books I’ve ever read)