To Feed the Cats
To Feed the Birds
A Good Morning in the High Prairie
This chunk of land was a ranch and is still a farm with a couple of horses free pastured in some comfortably vast acreage.
Early morning stretches long long stripes of blue-green across the lemon/lime mowed grass. The trees stand still in silhouette against prairie flatness that reaches westward. The sky has not chosen between pink and blue. So it wears both.
And I am still in my pajamas!
That hat is my defense against mosquitoes. I spray a dry mist of OFF on the under-brim and then I draw the upward curl down all around my face. It really works. Mosquitoes really love my face-skin, especially near the ears where the veins are closer to the surface.
First I will put fresh seed in a general bird feeder from which blackbirds, and pigeons and magpies, and small birds of all kinds serve themselves meals all day long. And doves. And two full grown pigeons. And migrating species of all kinds. I call them “my birds” and whistle to them as I pour seed into the feeder. Blackbirds eat high on that swinging thing. Pigeons stick close around underneath. enjoying the fallen seeds.
I run fresh hose-water into the wide platter where they will drink and bathe and splatter the concrete floor of the patio all day.
They are sitting in trees that line up by the fencing. They seem to have a formation, with official watch-birds sitting at the very top of the Russian Olives, and on the more prominent branch tips down the sides.
Clothes (not pajamas) seem a good idea; often enough some mud shoes as well when a person gets outside on a perfect August day like this. I carry some milk I have poured into a bottle, and some bits of protein left over from yesterday as well as a small and sturdy little dish.
Mama cat has, so far, brought up five kittens — four black and one striped — and has taught them the way to the barn from under the chicken house where they were born. Mama has been enjoying a dish of milk in the mornings, and now the kittens hide in the rafters of the barn until I have finished rattling around with the dishes with dry food and the scraps and of course, the fresh milk.
I talk to them quietly while mama glares at me with her eyes wide open and growls. The little ones wait until I turn off the barn light. They dash for the dish now. They must be ten or so weeks old.
They will not get names. Barn cats are beloved, but not as pets.
Last year the litter disappeared. Later someone found remains in the meadow.
I always loved my old farm in Collegeville. I was a renter, not a farmer, but I was a gardener and an animal lover enjoying a sort of paradise.
There is something wide and clean and very quiet about a farm in the morning.
Again, I am hanging clothes out to dry, and weeding a garden.
This is a good way to spend rare days when one is in her 80's.
