|
Journal of a Sabbatical |
|||||||||||
|
August 2, 2000 |
|
sexton of the cat house |
|||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
Adopt these cats at Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society. And check out the homeless cats, dogs, geese, and more at Adopt Homeless Paws. Today's Bird Sightings:
Today's Reading: Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit Today's Starting Pitcher: Pedro Martinez
Plum Island Bird List
Copyright © 2000, Janet I. Egan |
|
Titan has given up his bid for total world domination and settled for being king of the laundry room. We haven't really had a laundry room cat since Whiskers. Sandy tried it for awhile, but prefers to be in the main room lording it over his subjects and supervising the cleaning. Now that Sandy is done with his 10-day bite quarantine, he's the lord of the big yellow bucket again. Bubba is sprung from the rabies room. Yay! However, he doesn't understand he's supposed to be happy about being out among the general cat population. Poor Bubba. He hangs around the door of the rabies room waiting to be let in. I walk over to pet him and he twines around my legs looking up expectantly like I'm the one who's going to let him back into the familiar home he's known for the last six months. He purrs for me and head butts me anyway. Dishwashing goes really fast with Roy helping. We're almost totally back into our old rhythm and it's fun. Bob and Roy joke with each other in that easy male way that reminds me of my brothers. Bob says he got lured into volunteering here because when he was in the Navy he always wanted to work in a cat house. Roy shot right back with: "The same thing happened to me with the church. They asked me to be the sexton." Guess the surgery hasn't impaired his quick wit. The Wednesday morning crew is a witty bunch of characters. Wouldn't it be fun to be the sexton of the cat house? By lunch time I'm ravenous and in need of coffee. I think it might be creative and get me out of my rut to check out the festivities in downtown Newburyport. I wander through the booths at Yankee Homecoming looking for the MRFRS booth so I can say Hi to whoever is tending it today and buy a couple of Betty's catnip fishies (stuffed with her own powerful blend of catnip - most potent catnip fishies in town). I want to bring one to Domino. I never find the booth. Maybe she didn't set up today because the weather is so unpleasant.
Domino has no way of knowing I was going to bring her a catnip fishy, so it's not like she's disappointed. She's very talkative today. A man and a woman are both petting her and she's loving it. They ask me if this is the same cat that was here two years ago the last time they came. I tell them Domino has been here for at least 5 years that I know of. Whether she remembers the people or not is another story. I escape without buying any books. This is a good thing as I'm starting to think I'll have to get a real job to support my used book habit. (I ordered a set of Thoreau's journals, the 14 volumes bound as 2, from bibliofind yesterday. The seasonal collections are no longer enough for me.) Starlings and tree swallows are massing into flocks already. Thousands of tree swallows swooping and darting all over the place seem wonderful and fluid. Thousands of starlings just look menacing. And what the heck are starlings massing for? They don't migrate. It's kind of dark for birding. Maybe some of these short billed dowitchers are actually Hudsonian godwits. Only one of them is actively feeding. The others are all curled up so I can't really see their bills and legs clearly. But they look too small to be Hudsonian godwits. They are all the right size and shape and coloring to be short billed dowitchers, so that's probably what they are. Wanting them to be Hudsonian godwits doesn't make it so.
|
|||||||||
Titan
is staring out the laundry room window when I pull into the
parking lot this morning. As I'm getting out of the car and
looking up at Titan in the window, a great blue heron flies
low over my head into the marsh. I take my attention off
Titan for a minute to grab the binoculars and watch the
great blue land in a tree on the edge of the marsh. It's
magnificent.
I'm
standing on the boardwalk by the public dinghy dock watching
a little girl on a boat feed a flock of mallards. The
mallards zoom at top speed toward the food the instant it
hits the water. I cant' tell what it is she's feeding them.
A couple of mallards ignore the feeding frenzy and climb up
to sit on the edge of one of those inflatable dinghies -
kind of like a small Zodiac - to groom. A really scruffy
black pigeon joins them. Dirtiest, messiest looking pigeon
I've ever seen. Also the only all black pigeon I've ever
seen. All of a sudden I feel something running down my arm.
Gull shit. I look up to see what species of gull has crapped
on me - herring gull - before looking to see how much of it
got on my clothes. Time to find a restroom to clean up in,
get that cup of coffee, and get right back to my usual
routine questing for used books and new birds.
The
colors of the wildflowers (weeds) really stand out against
the grayness. In my continuing quest to learn the names of
all these weeds, I take a bunch of pictures. OK. What's
wrong with these weed pictures? Besides the fact that I have
no idea what those green flowers are. Hint: I took the
pictures at 2:00 in the afternoon. You guessed it, dear
reader. White Campion and Evening Primrose bloom at night
and close up by noon. The sky is so gray that even the
flowers think it's night!
