MissMeliss: Escribition

I have a long memory that is at some times vague and at others very specific.

My earliest specific memory is from when I was two or younger, and involves my grandmother’s back door, with the gauzy translucent curtain that veiled (but did not completely obstruct) the view through the heavy glass of the door, and their black dog, Misty. There are no details, beyond the presence of the dog, the fact that the door was closed. I think she may have wanted to go out, but I was far too little to even reach the doorknob.

It is somehow appropriate that I remember this dog in soft focus, as she was to fade from life before I really had memories of interaction before.

I wonder if I was born a “dog person” or made one, later. I’ve always responded more to canine pets, even before cats began to make me sneeze.

A group of crows is called a murder, but my dog, Miss Cleo is now a murderer of crows. Or grackles, at any rate. I let her out earlier to do her evening business, and heard her take off after a critter. There was a yowling sound as if she’d chased a cat from the yard, and then a pitiful screeching alternating with her barking, as she chased a grackle across the ground, to the lava rocks under the living room windows.

I called her away, hoping that the bird was merely stunned, and called Fuzzy for help. I yelled at Cleo. I don’t like yelling at dogs, and I’m ashamed that I did it, especially when she’s got a mix of terrier and spaniel in her, and a pretty high prey drive for such a relatively small dog. I realize that she was acting on instinct, but I was still appalled.

Fuzzy went out to see to the bird. It had a mangled leg, and its neck was broken, he said, though it was still moving. As a point of mercy, he had no choice but to finish the job, wrap it in a cocoon of paper tie it into a bag and put the whole thing in the trash can in the garage. He also said he suspects that the cat struck the initial blow, and dropped the bird when Cleo came out.

He grew up on a farm, and was calm about it.

And me?

I told Cleo I didn’t want kisses from her tonight, and then I shed tears for a grackle, a bird most people around here think of as a nuisance, the way people in New York and San Francisco think of pigeons.

I feel like it’s my fault.

I don’t know yet if there will be any Mustang events at the auto show in Fort Worth next weekend, but I do know that muscle cars are now on my horizon when they never were before because of the job I’ve been doing for the last year, but also because my cousin S. is talking about having NASCAR fantasies again.

I have to confess, I’ve never been able to sit through more than a lap or two of any auto race, but when we lived in Colorado when I was a kid, I did enjoy my one visit to the auto rallies on the ice of the Georgetown reservoir. My impressions of the day are choppy: cold weather, revving engines, cars that looked impossibly fast and impossibly flimsy, at once. I suppose there was also beer, but as a seven-year-old that wouldn’t have caught my attention.

Still, I smile at the memory I do have. And when I see old muscle cars for sale, like the mustang I wrote about several weeks ago, that was a tempting buy, if completely impractical, I get kind of wistful, and wonder if maybe I’m channeling S. Because I don’t like cars. No really, I don’t.

At any rate, Fuzzy and I are going to the auto show. I suspect he’s only agreeing because it will mean yet another weekend in which he will not have to paint the kitchen, and because I told him that the Humane Society will be there. “Cute puppies and cool cars,” I IM’d him, in my pitch. I have a hair appointment that Saturday, so I guess we’ll go on Sunday. The last day of the show. Oh well. It’ll still be fun.

We don’t often see geckos in January, but the little creatures must know instinctively what I have to go to Weather.com to find out: that it was cool, but not cold, and rainy all day, and as such it’s a lovely night for traipsing across the brick walls of my house in search of…whatever it is small reptiles and amphibians go in search of.

Thankfully, Miss Cleo didn’t see the gecko on the wall when I took her outside for “last call,” just a few moments ago, or she’d still be out there barking at it. Miss Cleo thinks geckos are a personal affront to her, encroaching upon her territory as they do. Miss Cleo is wrong, but you can’t always reason with a cocker/poodle/chi/staffy/thing. She saw a rodent climbing the fence and raced after it, but came back almost immediately, probably because it’s late and we’re all tired from weird sleep patterns.

I’m writing insurance content all this week, and it has me both bored silly and having odd connections. For example, a piece on term life insurance and death benefits made me remember the last few chapters of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I think I will try to sleep now.

Yesterday morning I woke up around five, jarred from the warm cocoon of sleep by Fuzzy’s digital-dental-drill alarm tone, and by the thought that bed seemed too hot, constricting, and uncomfortable, even though I wasn’t fully awake.

The morning had not even begun to blossom; sunrise was over an hour away, but in the false dawn light I crept across the deck from our cozy casita to the wicker sofa near the fire pit, draped on of the big cotton beach towel/throws around my shoulders, and let the wind seduce me.

The wind here is nothing like the wind in Texas. Partly because the gulf is about 100 feet from the back door, partly because of the latitude, the wind here is a wild sentient thing, and I could hear it’s voice even as I felt it whispering bold, naughty things across my skin.

I watched the sky lighten, heard the birds rouse themselves from feathered dreams, and suddenly even the deck was too confining. I wanted to be one of the wild creatures. I stood on the top of the cement wall that marks the edge of my parents’ property, and the wind ran invisible fingers through my hair, caressed my hot face with unseen hands. Around me it roared, with me it was gentle.

I slipped back into the casita, and drew a pair of ancient, fraying leggings on under my sleep shirt, twisted a bra on without taking anything off, and tossed a sweatshirt over it all. I stepped into my blue and purple teva sandals, and walked out the gate, and down the path (technically 5th street) to greet the churning, choppy sea.

Gulls flew overhead, and pelicans, so focussed on the broken waves that I could see their eyes dilating and refracting as they honed their focus on whatever fish was their prey at the moment. A stray duck bobbed on the surface of the water. I turned the camera skyward, to snap pictures of the waves and the pelicans, but the bird that strayed into my frame was no gull, no pelican, not even one of the frigate birds, but a gorgeous creature with a hunter’s profile and chocolate brown plumage. I tried to snap, but my digital’s shutter speed was no match for the swooping, diving bird that flew within inches of my hair, my fingers, me.

Back to the house, and the porch, I went, wanting to sit and watch. By now, false dawn had been replaced by the real thing, and the sky was evolving through yellow tones into warm pinks. My mother was up, brewing coffee, and she called me to join her, and I did, telling her of my morning adventure.

“You saw an osprey,” she said dismissing my excitement. But I’d met the osprey’s the night before on our twilight walk, when we’d had some nice mother-daughter time, and she’d introduced me to the blue heron who has a personal vendetta against Abigail (my parent’s neurotic, tiny, chihuahua).

I showed her the picture, and she said, “Wow…” and then, as one, we looked toward the see, and saw my hawk making a run for the sea, circling back, over the house, and diving into a glide so low across the pool that her feet could have skimmed the surface.

For an hour, we watched this bird, flying for no reason other than the primal pleasure of being caught between the sea and sky, borne aloft by strong wind, and held there by nature’s magic.

Hours later, after dusk, I would see the hawk one more time, in silhouette against the full moon.

I’m not sure how I managed it, but except for seven cards for which I had to track down addresses, and therefore are not already out in the mail, I finished the sending of the cards. Unless of course I don’t have your address because you texted it to my phone and I stupidly deleted it (you know who you are, oh amazing person in Montreal), or because you’ve moved and even though I lurk in your blog/journal/diary we don’t really keep in touch the way we should.

I even managed to write 20 ‘extra’ (as in over and above the names on my list) cards to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, so hopefully they’ll enjoy a bit of holiday cheer even if it takes til after the 25th to get there.

I like cards. I like the pictures on the front covers and the cheesy sentiments inside. I like the glittery envelopes (though probably should not have been writing cards with glitter in bed) and the seals and the textures. I like non-Christmas cards as much as Christmas cards, and I frequently use them for dropping notes to people. Note cards, especially, are useful when you want to keep in touch but don’t really have enough content (or time) for a long, rambling letter.

Today, if I have no other tasks, I’ll be baking cookies to leave for my dog sitter, and to take on the plane tomorrow. Oh, god, tomorrow. I’m not packed. I don’t know what to wear, I have so much to do, and my dogs keep circling the suitcases and giving me their slitty-eyed looks. The ones that say, “Yeah, Mom, we KNOW you’re abandoning us.”

At least they’ll be happy to see us in 10 days, and we’re leaving them in good hands.

Not hands like mine, that are covered in red and blue ink.

It’s a cold gray day here in Texas, and I needed something cheery, so I put on last year’s Christmas mix cd that I made, an entire cd of women singing Christmas songs, and forwarded to this lovely non-soprano, belty version of O Holy Night. I was singing along, rocking the proverbial rafters, waiting for my tea kettle to commence whistling, when a flash of color outside caught my eye.

I turned toward it, and was caught, breathless, watching a pair of cardinals feeding from the tray of wild bird food we keep on the picnic table (with a smaller table positioned over it as a concession to weather. The female was eating, the male, in his crimson glory, was perched on the top table, guarding her and waiting his turn.

I watched at the window, and he turned as if he could see through the glass and mesh and see me. For a heart-beat it seemed as if we communicated, and then the female left, and he moved down to the food, sampled a few seeds, looked toward me once more, nodded his little bird head, and disappeared.

Only after that did I think, “Damn, I should have grabbed the camera.”