A Holiday Is Born

 

            “This is war!” said Suzy.
            “That’s right, Suzy,!” said Toots, firmly.
            “Shall we tell them who our sworn enemy is?” said Suzy.
            “There is no question. It’s fleas,” said Toots. “Besides fleas, any other foe pales to insignificance!”
            “They are more insidious, and more opportunistic, than even raccoons or, in fact, mice,” said Suzy.
            “Therefore any weapon used against them is justified,” said Toots.
            “We propose, in that regard, a holiday to raise awareness,” said Suzy.
 

🌎DIATOMACEOUS EARTH DAY🌎

 
            “How’s that you say? How on earth, ahem, could a bunch of crushed diatoms help in the eternal battle against fleas?” said Toots. “Well let us explain, and you’ll see it right away!”
            “How it works is this. Diatoms lived in ancient lakes, and they are made of like, glass. Over a really long time they get deposited on the bottom of these lakes, then the lakes dry up and they get fossilized.
            “People dig the fossilized diatoms up and grind them into diatomaceous earth!” said Toots.
            “The cool thing about ground up diatoms is that it’s like a whole bunch of tiny broken glass pieces and they pierce all bugs, including fleas!” said Toots. “That’s it! They dry up!”
            “Dust it all over your carpets and floors, be careful, because it’s slippery on wood or linoleum floors. Then you vacuum it up in a few days!” said Suzy.
            “It’s not toxic to cats, or anybody else,” said Toots. “Except BUGS!”
            “Don’t breathe it in,” said Suzy.
            “You’re welcome,” said Toots!
            “July 26! Diatomaceous Earth Day!  Dig it!” said Suzy.
            Both girls dissolve into giggles……

🐈🖤🐈

Remembering A Summer

 

That's the Seattle Art Museum at Volunteer Park in the background there.

            Listening to these fans blowing yesterday, drowsing by my desk, brought a memory to mind of the only time in my life I lived alone.
            I was done with the community college here in Everett, and had moved to Seattle for the summer. I lived in a brick three story building by Volunteer Park, on Capitol Hill. I was working in a factory south of town sewing mostly what we call puffer jackets now. I worked in several of these places when I was a big kid. I still dream about the machines and the big noisy rooms and working just as fast as I could manage to.
            I have no idea what I ate, or cooked. I know I didn’t have much money.
            I took the Metro bus to work every day and then back home. I saw mostly the same characters on the bus every day. We never spoke.
            Just being there in the city fascinated me. I knew Seattle of course, but the last time I had lived there I was 6 years old. Then we moved out to the woods, but I’ve told that whole story before.
            It was a hot summer. I remember evenings with my window open, elbows on the ledge, just watching the light go down, and the city street, with strangers walking by. There were big old trees along the street. There was a scent to it, and a sound, so foreign to home. Distant traffic makes a kind of song.
            I was mostly listening to jazz at that point. It must have been on the radio. I didn’t have a record player, though I did possess a couple of albums. Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, Miles Davis, and others.
            There was a crosswalk on my corner. To help blind people cross I guess, it had a beep. I heard that beep until it got into my jazzy head. I remember a scrap of verse from those nights alone in the dark watching the city.
            Why, when fan sings, do birds buy night’s phony beep-cheep?”
            That’s it. All I remember. Apparently some birds responded to the sound, or I thought they did. I’m afraid I wrote an awful lot of verse.
            It has to have been the summer of 1968, quite a year, in all.
            Then I moved back home, went to the UW for a few quarters, and the rest of my life happened.  
            But for one breathless hot summer, man, I was cool!

🏙️

The Man Who Fell Into His Tree

 

            Something woke Max in the middle of the night. It wasn’t noise. Not at first anyhow.
            It was light.
            You know how a person becomes accustomed to the ambient sounds around home, and the usual smells, and the normal level of light. It all depends on where a person lives. If there is traffic nearby, there will be headlights through open curtains. If a person lives in the woods or on a farm there are only the sun, moon, and stars, and whatever yard lights and such.
            Max and Judy lived on a one acre hobby farm in the suburbs of a small city in western Washington state. Max was retired so  he was there most of the time, tending his trees, raised garden boxes, and a flock of busy hens. It was a nice life.
            Outside Max’s bedroom window, on the far side of the lawn, next to the woods, was a an old maple. It has been there before the house was built and the garden made. It was late summer, and the bedroom window was open. Max and Judy believed in fresh air at night.
            Something changed enough to make Max open his eyes. Judy slept on. Something was different outside. He sat up to take a look around. The room was fine. Totally normal.
            So, he went to the window to take a look out there.
            There was a globe of yellow light, a normal color, about the size of a cantaloupe melon moving around among the leaves of the ancient maple. Max’s first thought was that someone with a large flashlight had climbed his tree and was up there moving around for some unaccountable reason.
            “Judy, wake up. I’m going outside. Some nut is up in the maple with a light,” said Max.
            “What? Don’t go out there! Just call the police,” said sleepy Judy, up on one elbow.
            He put on his terry robe, and said, “It won’t take long. I’ll  just tell them to get out of the tree and go home. I bet it’s some nut who thinks it’s a magical tree or something.”
            “If I don’t come back, then you can call the cops,” said Max, barefoot, stomping out of the bedroom and to the backdoor of their house.
            The night was like night often is. Cool, a bit of dampness to the air, quiet in a sort of impending way. There was traffic noise from the freeway a few miles away, and he could see lights here and there in neighbor’s houses. The grass was in need of a mow and covered in dew.
            When Max got to his tree, the light was still up there, moving slowly around as if it was taking inventory of the leaves.
            “Get out of the tree!” Max ordered. Nothing changed. Not at all.
            There was a bench under this old tree, made of wrought iron, painted green.
            “If you don’t come down, I will come up there and make you get down,” called Max.
            It was kind of a rash threat to be made by a man pushing seventy years, barefoot, and in a bathrobe. But, Max climbed up on the iron bench and threw a leg over the lowest branch. Then he grabbed a higher branch with his right hand.
            The yellow light moved up higher into the tree.
            He couldn’t see any person associated with the big yellow light, but he was so sure that he hefted himself up onto the second branch. Sitting there, on a branch in his maple tree, in the middle of the night, Max noticed a sort of ringing sound, very high register, like you might imagine, if you were so inclined, that fairies might make by ringing fairy bells. It made him
 feel something or remember something, but he couldn’t quite place it. It felt like a memory but had no attached data. He frowned, working on it, trying to remember.
            Then there was an odor. Not unpleasant, but strong. The smell of sap, and crushed leaves. And while he was listening to the fairy bells, and smelling the green sappy scent, the night changed all around Max. It was as if he were in another place. He fell.
            He landed plop, right on his bottom on a stoney slope. He was in twilight, and surrounded by millions of wee lights, starlike, but not stars. Perhaps they were more like fireflies, though he had never seen fireflies at home.
            While Max was sitting on the stone surface, some small figures ran by  him laughing. He couldn’t really see them well at all. “Gotcha!” one yelled as they ran past.
 
            It was then that Judy woke for real. “Oh!” she said, remembering what Max had told her before he went out. It felt like it must have been some time too.
            “Oh!,” she said, and threw her feet onto the floor. “Oh, no!”
            Wearing only a granny nightie, Judy padded rapidly into the kitchen, and reached down into a lower cabinet. What she pulled out of there was a five pound bucket of honey of known provenance, real honey, the real stuff.
            Then white cotton billowing behind her, Judy ran out the same way Max had. There was no light in the maple tree, and the bench was knocked over.
            “Oh, no, they di’n’t!” she muttered in her Appalachian accent, picking up the bench.
            Judy put the bucket of real honey on the grass under the branches of the ancient maple  The she stood back.
            “Take this honey, and give me back mine!” said Judy, like she meant it.
            “Give him back!,” she called, saying a few words in some old language nobody speaks anymore.
            It was quiet for a while, a standoff. Negotiations, bargains, who knows?
            A small figure the size of a cottontail rabbit ran out of the darkness and grabbed the bucket and disappeared again.
            It was quiet again for several minutes. Judy waited, and did not lessen her pressure.
 
            Max fell off of the branch he had been sitting on. Plop, he landed right on the iron bench, looking startled to find himself there.
            “Why have you been out here so long?” said Judy. “I was worried about you!”
            “I saw a light in the tree, I think,” said Max. “I came to see who was in the tree.”
            “You must have sat down and gone to sleep,” said Judy.
            “I think I did, Judy! I think I came out here and sat down and went to sleep,” said Max.
            “I  had a funny dream though, but it’s fading.”
            “We may as well stay up now,” Judy said. “Morning is nearly here. I’ll start breakfast and why don’t you have a shower and warm up?”
            Max agreed that a shower sounded nice about then, and then breakfast after.
            Before they went back into the house, Judy turned and gave the tree a long deep blue-eyed look.

💙

           

Any Little Road Anywhere, Open Thread

 

The best thing ever, I think.

No particular destination,

A mystery to be followed to its end.

Timeless.

Don't you think so?

🍁🖤🍁

A Trip To A Lumpy Little Mewn

 

            It was a heck of a hot day. Suzy was sitting on the black chair grooming her side in a sleepy, desultory manner. Something kept disturbing her little noodle.
            Maybe someone wanted to talk to her. Since she only ever talked to Toots by KittyComm™, she figured it must be Toots!
            It was Toots!
            “Suzy? Are you there?” said Toots. (telepathically, of course)
            “Mrrrp?” said Suzy, sleepily.
            “You want to get out of  here?” said Toots.
            “Wha? I’m not there. I’m here!” said Suzy.
            “Don’t mess with me, Suzy. It’s too hot for that nonsense. You were joking, right?” said Toots.
            “The weather is stupid here too. Where do you want to go?” said Suzy, squinting at a spot on her paw, wondering if it had always been there.
            "Boss was listening to a video. Two guys, Jesse and Max. There were talking about a mewn. Not this mewn. Another one. Around Mrrrz. Remember Mrrrz? Yeah, well, it’s got this lumpy little mewn and on this mewn there is a mondolith,” said Toots.
            “What’s a mondolith?”
            “Maybe they said megalith. People want to know what’s in this megalith,” said Toots.
            “Back up a minute,” said Suzy. “Is it a building? What, they think it’s full of aliens?”
            “They don’t know! We could be the first to check it out, Suzy! Think about it. If we could just communicate it, we could be famous. First cats in a megalith, on Phobos, I think that’s the mewn’s name.”
            “It sounds like ‘big rock thing.’ What if it’s just a big rock thing and nobody was ever there?”
            “You know, it’s cold in space?” said Toots. “Not that it makes a heck of a lot of difference to cats on an Exoprowl. Still….”
            “I’m sold. Let’s do it,” said Suzy.

***

            And before you could say Holly Golly Buttered Biscuit, the girls were off.
            First they hovered about our own blue planet, noting with approval how beautiful it was.
            “Let’s press on to Mrrrz,” said Toots. And in a cosmic blink they floated in orbit over Mrrrz, looking for the lumpy little mewn.
            They had to orbit Mrrrz a couple times before they spotted it. But at last….
            “It’s awfully small, and it’s not round!” said Suzy. “Where is its megalith?”
            “We better go down there and check. Maybe it’s all human malarkey! We must search,” said Toots resolutely.
            So, round and round the little mewn they orbited, altering their orbit each time to see more of the surface. Finally, they saw something that looked way too big to have just happened like stuff usually does. It didn’t look like a hill, a crater, a desert, or anything natural, and it was way too tall.
            “That must be it,” said Toots.
            “It looks like a messed up skyscraper,” said Suzy.
            “It’s probably old,” said Toots.
            “How old could it be?” said Suzy, dubiously. (Cats don’t grok time much.)
            It was very tall and thin for a building. It was dark in material, and dark inside. No lights brightened its windows. There were many stories. If there had ever been glass in those windows, it was eons gone.
            “I’m afraid,” said Suzy. “It looks scary!”
            “Remember we are intelligently curious as well as Cautious™, Dear,” said Toots.
            “Very well,” said Suzy. “I must remember we aren’t really here; we’re just looking!”
            “That’s right, let’s try this window here,” said Toots.
            Inside, there was a room with a regular flat floor. In the smaller room off that one there was a table. On the table were four plates and some odd looking implements. On the plates were some ancient ghosts of scraps of food.
            Around the table were four things much like stools, two were knocked over, and two just sat back from the table.
            It looked like whoever had been there had left in a hurry.
            “I wonder what they looked like,” said Suzy.
            “Now, that could be scary. Maybe you don’t really want to know that,” said Toots.
            There were 15 floors, and each one showed signs of rapid departure. They found drawers hanging open. Tools scattered. Broken machinery.
            There were closets open with contents spilling out. The remaining clothing appeared to be some sort of uniform, roughly hominid in configuration. These garments appeared to have been dark green with some kind of shining insignia.
            The girls began to wonder  if the inhabitants had left voluntarily or if something else had happened to them.
            Floor by floor it was the same, all the way down to the bottom.
            The very bottom floor was a single large room. Doors opened out onto the rough surface as it they had stood open forever. The floor was covered in fine grey dust in drifts. Whoever had lived and worked here was long long gone.
            “Toots, look at that,” said Suzy. She was staring at an image engraved into the black stone wall.
            “It’s a cat! An impossibly regal and mighty cat! An ancient ancestor of all cats, surely, Suzy,” whispered Toots, in awe.
            And so it was. Carved into the stone was a great tabby, stripes and all, wearing one of the green uniforms they had seen upstairs. The image was huge, far over the size of an Earth lion.
            “We’ll never know why they left, or how, but we know one thing,” said Toots.
            “Yes!” said Suzy. “Cats were here first!”
            “Not those bossy talking monkeys!” said Toots.
            “How will we ever tell them?” laughed Suzy.
            “I don’t know! Maybe someday they will figure it out themselves,” said Toots, “Oh, let’s go home.”
            It was nearly night, and starting to cool down when the girls got back home, each to her own little world on Earth. Each held in her heart the knowledge that cats had been to the mewn of Mrrrz first, and that was enough.
            The megalith continued its vigil. 
 

🌖

A KittyComm™ Transmission:

 

 
            “Good morning, Earthlings! We hope you are seated comfortably and are fortified with fresh mugs of coffee, whatever that is!” said Suzy from her location somewhere in the house.
            “Yes! This won’t take long, but a question has come up, and we want to address it,” said Toots, also located somewhere, undisclosed.
            “Some have impugned our courage!” said Suzy.
            “That’s right! Some, I won’t say who, ahem, have equated a rational state of caution with raw fear! Nonsense!” said Toots. “Any ninny should be able to see the difference.”
            “There is a huge difference. How would you describe it, Dear,” said Suzy.
            “Caution™ is required in a state of intelligent Courage. It’s a weighing of the options available in a certain situation, and choosing the best course of action. Courage is not a reckless, thoughtless exposure to danger! Far from it!” Toots said, fervently.
            “It takes thought!” added Suzy. “How about an example? Take that vicious sounding crow out there. Do you hear him yelling ‘come out!’?”
            “Yes, I do!” said Toots, “Even though he’s in Milltown, a safe distance from my location, one would think.”
            “And what would be the truly intelligent, Courageously Cautious™ reaction to such a provocation, Toots?” queried Suzy.
            “My advice would be to sit tight, under cover. Don’t go out there! No good could come of exposing the tender back of the neck to that beak,” said Toots firmly. “How about if there is a knock on the door, Suzy? What say you?”
            “What say I? Can you guess? I say remain in a position of cover, but able to see what is knocking if one of the gullible pinkies happens to  open the door!” said Suzy.
            “Brrrrrr! Anything could be out there! The mind boggles!
            “To reiterate, Caution™ is not fear! Fear is irrational. It’s based on nothing but emotion. It might even be free-floating physical anxiety!” said Toots.
            “We are not Scaredy-Cats, nay! We are Thinking-Cats!” said Suzy, “And those are the very best kind of cats to be!
            “On the subject of thoughtless braggadocio, I could mention these Scouts..” said Suzy.
            “No doubt,” said Toots. “Young Toms, whatcha gonna do?”
            “Stay clear?” said Suzy.
            “It’s the only way!,” said Toots. “Now, I believe we have covered this topic sufficiently. I’m getting sleepy, and I’m sure you are too…..!”
 
            The signal dropped at this point.

📻

           

I Pondered The Imponderable

 

             I am relatively sure that I was among a throng of impressionable bookish young wights, when I was in my early teen years, who used to bust their noggins on the question of existence.
          Back then I didn’t quite say it like that in my middle of the night thought experiments. How I cast the question was; what if nothing at all, neither God Himself, or the Universe had ever existed. I seriously tried to imagine such a state. (Of course, there could have been no state of any kind if what I was trying to imagine….. You see how it is.)

           It was a whole lot easier to ponder my own lack of existence, if I had never been born. I learned to be grateful for existence. Surely the greatest gift of all, to exist.
            I knew nothing of theology, or philosophy, or any of the famous thinkers in history. I had only my own reason, and the Old Book to go by. Talk about a noob!
            After banging away for several decades, at the nuts and bolts of my own mundane daily existence, it occurred to me that existence isn’t just a big deal, it’s the only deal.
            “World without end.”
            At the bottom of the physicist’s glass, once he had drunk all the world’s wisdom as far as he could understand it, he found that he faced GOD.
            Somewhere in the Jewish liturgy, I remember the phrase, “There is no One else.” And, indeed, it is so. There can be no One else, and He is existence.

*❤*

            Additions, debate, commentary of all kinds welcomed and desired.  Tell me what you think. I'd love to know.

           

💮🖤💮