Tag: Yard

Kittens – the origin story

Last year I took a couple of non-fiction writing classes from Janisse Ray, which I highly recommend doing. One of the assignments was to write a five-part essay.

I wrote about rescuing kittens, which is, if you don’t know, a thing we do. This is the first section.

I also want to say that I was only able to take those classes because of the membership team that supports my work. They pay a bit each month as a form of patronage, which enables me to not have to put ads all over my website or set up affiliate deals or pump out sponsored posts. In exchange, they get first dibs on lots of things, like member-only sales, writing that was just for them (on average, two essays a month) and more. They first saw this essay shortly after it was written last year.

If you like my stuff and want to see more of it, the best and most impactful way to support my work is to become a member. You can learn more here. Thanks! – HH

It had been a lovely tree, with a multi-trunked base that spread its limbs wide. In the fall, its brilliant red leaves were perfectly framed in our bedroom window. But alas, it was a Bradford Pear, an invasive tree that is spreading throughout our southern woodlands and destroying native habitat. Worse in the near term for me was that it is fragile, dropping huge limbs at every storm, and it had had to come down.

I had chopped it at 6 feet and then girdled the stump, so the trunk could slowly decay and thus feed the tiny critters in the yard, as well as the birds that delight in meals of tiny critters. The spreading trunks formed a perfect pocket at ground level, much the way your hand would if it were holding a ball by your fingertips.

But that had been a few years ago, and now the stump was covered in Virginia Creeper, which also turns red in the fall, and created nesting and hiding space for the tiny woodland creatures that live in my yard.

On this particular May morning, the sky was blue, the humidity was low, and the air was filled with birdsong as they let each other know they had made it through the night. Even though it was time for me to leave for work, I lingered on my morning walk around the yard. We get so few perfect days to be outside here, it felt irresponsible to not enjoy as much of this one as I was able.

It was then I heard it. During a lull in birdsong, I heard a rustle in the underbrush near the pear stump, and then I saw Calico peering out of the Creeper, between the trunks.

Calico is one of half a dozen stray and feral cats that we see in our neighborhood, a collection of 70 year old ranch houses on heavily wooded lots on the north side of Jackson. As people have moved away and abandoned their pets, their descendants now run wild in a local colony, relying on the kindness of strangers and their own wits to survive.

We have given them functional names, mostly descriptive in nature, so we can keep track of them. We have Calico, Tortie, Garfield, and Big Tom, as examples. They are grateful for our feeding them on our back deck, and when we are tardy with he morning meals, they peer in the sliding glass door to our living room, to make sure we are OK, and are aware they are waiting on their daily bread.

However grateful they may be, it is rare you can get within a few feet of one of them, and here Calico was, watching me, frozen, realizing she had made too much noise as I was walking past, and now she must decide how to play this. I squatted, to be at eye level, and she bolted to a clump of shrubs 20 feet away, but then focused her death stare back at me.

I peered in the pocket formed by the dead trunks and saw why – inside the nest were six tiny kittens, less than 3 days old. They were a panoply of colors seen in our local colony – two tuxedo cats, two tortoise shell, a ginger, and one perfect calico.

Immediately I knew that I had a problem.

My problem – well, my immediate problem – was not that these six adorable kittens in our backyard that, if they survived, would double the size of our colony, would wreck havoc on our songbird population, and would be pumping out kittens themselves before fall. While all of that was true, my immediate problem was my wife, Renee.

She loves animals of all sorts, strongly preferring them to people. I once asked her why, and she explained to me, in tones that would suggest I am an idiot, that no animal had ever hurt her on purpose, and that was not true of humans, and so it was clear to her where she should invest her time.

Were I were to force her to choose between me and six kittens, I am not sure the deal would turn in my direction. I am definitely not in any mood to test that scenario.

I know that when I tell her about these kittens, she will want to save them, to make sure they are cared for, that they go to good homes. I can see it all playing out in front of us – our summer vacation dashed, the constant attention, the additional cost. Our sixteen year old grey tabby Felix was in the process of slowly dying, and the vet bills were mounting. If I went inside and told her, my goose was cooked. The smart thing was to ignore them and go to work.

But for 18 years I have found it difficult to lie to her, to look her in the eye and not tell her something she would want or need to know. It is possible I could get away with it, and these kittens could grow and be weened and then I would act surprised along with her when “new” cats showed up at the sliding glass door in late summer. However, I do not want to get away with it, do not want to deprive her of the joy she will get from these kittens, and do not want to ever lie to her.

I peer at the little kittens once more, and then slowly stand, my 52 year old knees resisting the movement. I look at the house, then back at the kittens, and then with a sigh of resignation, begin walking toward the house.

Beautyberry

This is an American beautyberry bush (Callicarpa americana) which lives in my front yard. It spends most of the year being a somewhat boring shrub with insignificant tiny flowers. But the fruit in the fall is this brilliant purple/magenta, which really stands out.

The berries are edible, but not very good. Some people do make jelly from them, which proves that if you add enough sugar to things, they eventually taste better. Also notice that some critter is eating the leaves on this plant – that is NOT a bad thing. It’s a native plant, that has coevolved with the bug life in this region for many thousands of years. I want the bugs to eat my plants, because I want the birds that eat the bugs.

People think of berries when planting for birds, but berries only last a few weeks – bugs are year round. Plant for bugs if you want birds. No bugs, no birds. It’s that simple. If your plants are not being eaten, they are not part of the ecosystem.

Carnivores!

These are pitcher plants – they’re carnivorous, like Venus Flytraps are, and they’re native to the southeast. I have a container of them growing on our back deck

When I get my ducks in a row, I want to build a carnivorous garden bed in the backyard. I love them.

Like most horrible things, they’re beautiful. I see the flies hovering around them and wish I could warn the flies away, but instead I sit and watch them fly into the trap, doomed.

Our yard

On the 23rd day, I’m grateful for our yard.

By the time I was born, we still had 33 acres of land from the original 120, the difference having been sold off in crisis sized increments over the decades before I was born. But we didn’t have a yard – not really. We had the part of the land we cut with a lawnmower and the part we cut with the bush-hog and the part that had cows or was the garden. But we didn’t have a “yard”.

My great-aunt had a proper yard – with a fence around it and foundation plantings and all of that. So did the people who owned the grocery store my grandmother had worked at. I remember they had rose bushes in the corner of a giant zoysia lawn, with concrete stepping stones crossing it, going from the driveway to their front door. I had never seen stepping stones before then, and of course every time we went over I would pretend the grass was burning hot lava and I would hop from stone to stone, unscathed.

They also had a huge covered front porch, with a swing on one end, and I dreamed of one day being rich enough to have my own porch swing.

From 1990 until 2013, I lived in places (like apartments) that didn’t have yards, or places where I didn’t have control of the yard (like duplexes). But in 2013, we bought a house. With a yard.

It was just under a 5th of an acre – 50 feet by 150 or so. The front yard was 50×25. I didn’t care – Over the five years we lived there, I turned it into a riotous cottage garden, packed with raspberries, blueberries, peaches, plums, roses, crabapples, black-eyed Susan’s, chickens, irises, and more. And there were concrete stepping stones across the tiny strip of lawn that led from the driveway to our front door.

Sadly, it was really my yard, not ours. Try as she might, Renee never really felt safe in that yard, alone. So while she appreciated it, there was no real sense she enjoyed being in it. She wouldn’t sit on the porch and hang out, for example.

Well, partly it was that she didn’t feel safe – but also we had a neighbor across the street who had poor boundaries. I lived across from him for two years, and never knew his name – he told us to call him “Moose”, and he had the habit of appending the word “Baby” to my name and calling Renee “darlin”.

“Hey, Hugh Baby!” he would shout across the street when I would walk out on the porch to check the mail. He did not have air conditioning, so he would sit on his porch shirtless and in boxer shorts most of the summer, shouting at people driving by and talking to people on his speaker phone. It added that special something to the experience. He would shout across the street – a distance of maybe 75 feet, porch to porch, rather than come over to talk.

One day I was doing something in my yard, and the roses were all abloom and it was just a carnival of color. This must have impressed Moose, because he walked out of his house, saw me, and yelled, “Hugh Baby, you are one green thumb motherfucker!”

Part of mine and Renee’s agreement moving here was that if we were going to disrupt our lives and move literally halfway across the continent, she got to pick the house. When we moved here, the housing cost differential was such that we could afford and bought a much more suburban-sized ranch house, with a large half acre yard on a quiet street, a street where people park in driveways and not on the curb, a street where people walk their dogs and will stop and chat with you as they go by. And most importantly, it’s a yard she feels safe spending time in.

Cottage garden is still my preferred aesthetic, but it takes longer in such a large yard. But it’s coming – there are rose bushes and bottle trees and vine covered arbors and metal folk art in the front yard, including a three-foot-tall metal chicken, and in the spring, daffodils and paper whites and in summer, tons of cosmos and zinnias.

Our fenced in backyard is in process, with a large potager garden going in this winter, and my workshop and the chicken coop and fire pit, and a wildlife border surrounding the whole thing.

It doesn’t have a huge front porch, but last year, I built an arbor and a swing in the shade of our huge magnolia tree. Most afternoons, Renee will sit in the swing and listen to music on her headphones and just enjoy the space. I will often take a break around then, and go out and sit with her, and we will watch the hummingbirds and the butterflies and chat with the people who walk by.

And our neighbors across the street here still yell at me when they see me, but they are six and three and they shout and dance and wave until you notice them and wave back, and how could anyone ever be upset at that?