Special Deliveries
42. I still miss my cat Knuckles who died two or three years ago. If I think about it too much I could cry, so I won't. Knuckles was a great cat -- I pulled him from the womb (almost literally).
Several years before Knuckles died, a very strange thing starting happening. At the time I co-owned six cats: four of them (including Knuckles) were indoor/outdoor, one (Mickie)was too old to go outside, and the remaining cat, Noodles, had forgotten all she ever known about house training and was ( and is ) restricted to the out-of-doors.
I live in a two story Cape Code style house that I bought from my parents in a relatively normal suburb. There is a deck on the back of my house that my father (mostly) and brothers (more them then I) and I built. The deck is on the second story. It extends the entire length of the house and is accessible from either of the two upstairs bedroom ( one of which I'm converting into a library, office, bat cave) or from a set of stairs that leads up from the porch directly beneath it. The deck is a great pleasure in my life, as it is 90% covered by a roof, it faces towards the little lake in the suburbs upon which my house sits, and, perhaps best of all, it is graced with a porch swing ( or should it be a deck swing?) that hangs beneath a ceiling fan. This make the deck usable in rain or shine ( I foolishly sat out there and observed hurricane Isabel last year, the wind was blowing from the front of the house so I was sheltered and dry. several times, however, the wind gusts were sufficently violent to make me run inside. You could literally feel the air being sucked out of the protected area of the deck when that happened) about nine months out of the year . .. August is generally too hot and January and February too cold. Each of these details is unimportant to the story at hand, but I thought I'd pad this post out with a description of it. I spend an awful lot of time out on the deck, pacing back and forth ( the hobby I am most dedicated too and have spent the most time doing), watering plants, drinking beer and occasionally smoking.
One year around November, flowers began appearing on my deck. I didn't notice at first, or at least didn't think it was unusual as things blow up on the deck quite a bit. But soon I noticed that two or three of these flowers would appear every morning, inexplicably. They were all the same kind, a type of camellia I think. They were all stemless and generally in pretty poor shape. I didn't do anything about it. Soon enough there were literally hundreds of these flowers on the deck in various stages of decomposition.
I had really had no idea where they were coming from. After all it was November. In this part of the country there isn't much in bloom at that time other than camellias ( or whatever those things were, I'm pretty sure they were camellias, so lets just assume they were). Once I began to notice them and worry about it a little bit (it was freaky), I noticed that some neighbors 4 houses down had a camellia bush of the kind that matched the flowers on my porch and that it was in bloom.
Camellias are relatively messy trees/bushes/whatever. They put out a lot of flowers for a relatively long amount of time (twice a year in these parts) and they drop an extraordinary quantity of these flowers as they go. If you want to ensure that these bushes don't get a nasty disease that causes the blooms to rust you're supposed to clean up the dropped blooms regularly.
The question of course was how where these flowers getting from point A ( my neighbors yard) to point B ( my deck). The answer, of course, was Knuckles, my cat.
For some reason Knuckles had subverted his instinct for bringing dead mice and birds to my door step to the practice, perhaps even an obsession, with bringing dead flowers, but only from that particular bush. I had another type of camellia bush in my back yard, but none of those flowers ever made it onto the deck. He did it pretty sneakily too. I suppose he had observed how displeased I was when he brought dead critters to me ( despite the obvious charm and utility of a half eaten mouse) and had decided he would best provide for me by bringing me this example of the earth's bounty under the cover of night. I finally caught him at it early one morning as he trotted back from the neighbors with a one of the camellias practically covering his face. I was amazed that he could see where he was going let alone get it up to the deck. Later I noticed that his face was pretty much constantly covered in pollen(see picture below). Why he did this and why that particular bush I guess I'll never know.
42. I still miss my cat Knuckles who died two or three years ago. If I think about it too much I could cry, so I won't. Knuckles was a great cat -- I pulled him from the womb (almost literally).
Several years before Knuckles died, a very strange thing starting happening. At the time I co-owned six cats: four of them (including Knuckles) were indoor/outdoor, one (Mickie)was too old to go outside, and the remaining cat, Noodles, had forgotten all she ever known about house training and was ( and is ) restricted to the out-of-doors.
I live in a two story Cape Code style house that I bought from my parents in a relatively normal suburb. There is a deck on the back of my house that my father (mostly) and brothers (more them then I) and I built. The deck is on the second story. It extends the entire length of the house and is accessible from either of the two upstairs bedroom ( one of which I'm converting into a library, office, bat cave) or from a set of stairs that leads up from the porch directly beneath it. The deck is a great pleasure in my life, as it is 90% covered by a roof, it faces towards the little lake in the suburbs upon which my house sits, and, perhaps best of all, it is graced with a porch swing ( or should it be a deck swing?) that hangs beneath a ceiling fan. This make the deck usable in rain or shine ( I foolishly sat out there and observed hurricane Isabel last year, the wind was blowing from the front of the house so I was sheltered and dry. several times, however, the wind gusts were sufficently violent to make me run inside. You could literally feel the air being sucked out of the protected area of the deck when that happened) about nine months out of the year . .. August is generally too hot and January and February too cold. Each of these details is unimportant to the story at hand, but I thought I'd pad this post out with a description of it. I spend an awful lot of time out on the deck, pacing back and forth ( the hobby I am most dedicated too and have spent the most time doing), watering plants, drinking beer and occasionally smoking.
One year around November, flowers began appearing on my deck. I didn't notice at first, or at least didn't think it was unusual as things blow up on the deck quite a bit. But soon I noticed that two or three of these flowers would appear every morning, inexplicably. They were all the same kind, a type of camellia I think. They were all stemless and generally in pretty poor shape. I didn't do anything about it. Soon enough there were literally hundreds of these flowers on the deck in various stages of decomposition.
I had really had no idea where they were coming from. After all it was November. In this part of the country there isn't much in bloom at that time other than camellias ( or whatever those things were, I'm pretty sure they were camellias, so lets just assume they were). Once I began to notice them and worry about it a little bit (it was freaky), I noticed that some neighbors 4 houses down had a camellia bush of the kind that matched the flowers on my porch and that it was in bloom.
Camellias are relatively messy trees/bushes/whatever. They put out a lot of flowers for a relatively long amount of time (twice a year in these parts) and they drop an extraordinary quantity of these flowers as they go. If you want to ensure that these bushes don't get a nasty disease that causes the blooms to rust you're supposed to clean up the dropped blooms regularly.
The question of course was how where these flowers getting from point A ( my neighbors yard) to point B ( my deck). The answer, of course, was Knuckles, my cat.
For some reason Knuckles had subverted his instinct for bringing dead mice and birds to my door step to the practice, perhaps even an obsession, with bringing dead flowers, but only from that particular bush. I had another type of camellia bush in my back yard, but none of those flowers ever made it onto the deck. He did it pretty sneakily too. I suppose he had observed how displeased I was when he brought dead critters to me ( despite the obvious charm and utility of a half eaten mouse) and had decided he would best provide for me by bringing me this example of the earth's bounty under the cover of night. I finally caught him at it early one morning as he trotted back from the neighbors with a one of the camellias practically covering his face. I was amazed that he could see where he was going let alone get it up to the deck. Later I noticed that his face was pretty much constantly covered in pollen(see picture below). Why he did this and why that particular bush I guess I'll never know.
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