What We Choose to See

I slept well. The first night in four or five nights, maybe. I woke yawning, but clearer than I’ve been in a few days. This morning I noticed I put last night’s pork chop leftover in the freezer not the refrigerator. I also can’t find my nifty hole-punch pen. My first thought is that Leonard took it and hid it, since it scares the bejeezus out of him. It makes a horrendous “thwop” sound when I pull up on it, let go – and the coil slams the metal pieces together to drive a hole into the paper (and into the wood slab under the paper).

Yesterday when I was using it, he crawled up in E.’s lap – all 35 kilo-or-so of him curled up awkwardly in a rocking chair against the man he’s barely trusted for two-and-a-half years. I think E. secretly liked it.

Still, I doubt Leonard absconded with the thing. I should check the freezer.

It’s Easter vacation, but everything seems quiet. A friend sent me a photo of flowers blooming. She’s in a town a few hours south of here. Here it’s raining. The magpies are monopolizing the seeds we leave out for the finches. And I saw what I thought was a next while we were running on Monday, only to have E. point out that all the feathers were from the dead goose lying in the center of the “nest” in the reeds.

Mink have to eat, too, I suppose.

We’d stopped for a few minutes about 500 meters before the end of our run to watch two squirrels – playing? fighting? mating? I have no idea. But they were loudly chasing each other around the trunks of trees, and hopping from tree to tree. Flashes of deep russet in the otherwise gray day.

When I first began running – more than ten years ago – the flashes of the white tails of deer were my reward for getting out there. I took it very personally. A nod from the universe that I was doing well. But there aren’t really deer here where we run. In five years we’ve seen three. And worried about the unleashed dogs we know are there in the mornings. Dogs will go after a deer. But I am pretty sure the geese and the swans can take on any dog.

Now I wait for the cows to be let out of the barn every spring. I stop and talk to the heifers that wander near the fence next to the trail. Take their pictures, while the matriarch scolds them for whatever… I imagine they’re being called “attention-seeking” or “flirt”. At any rate, they are beautiful creatures. But I think I’ve written about this before? The under-appreciated beauty of a healthy cow.

When I lived in Kentucky the boys in high school called girls heifers. I swear, heifers are downright charming animals. In England, of course, “cow” is a common insult. What the hell is wrong with cows? Sure, there are ornery cows. But there are ornery sheep, and goats have devil eyes, and cats? Cats can be downright impish. Nudging things off counter tops while they stare you square in the face. I had a cat once, given to me by a boyfriend, who peed all over my new boyfriend’s things. But the cultural norm is to use “kitten” as some kind of sexy term-of-endearment. What is wrong with people and their relationship to animals? And maybe baby animals in particular?

For the record, I do not want E. to begin calling me a cow as a term of endearment either. At least not in public. I am not confident enough to be the vanguard of bovine re-branding.

I think our relationships with animals are as bizarrely “branded” as our relationships with people. We are all ugly messes – some of us are just better at public relations than others.

Stuck in a story
from a single perspective
– bite for bite – we eat
the elephant in the room
never apologizing