Over The Road

Queen Scrap with Feather & Stanley:

'No-one told me that Kittehs could be tedious!'

I had a good day, long lunch with Mike, I was so unrelentingly positive I exhausted meself.

Truth is, I'm scared. When will I earn?

Later I stopped and talked to Jos.

She was worried. Seems like Scrap is breakfasting Over The Road these days!

Scrap didn't appear on That Verandah this morning.

As we spoke of the little one, the small pirate face peeked over Maggie's fence.

Scrap, AKA Caprice, had heard her name.

She came dancing across the road to greet Jos, ignoring me.

She wouldn't let me clean that divinely fluffy tail of hers even though she's accumulated a few weed seeds.

Has there been a transfer in Catland?

Oh, it's all too complicated.

Anna thinks of adopting Stanley. With White Feather and Delicate Fred, Stanley is a good clean inside cat and Anna and her partner leave their cats inside in daytimes while at work.

I'll find Stanley's early pomes one day.

Possibly Anna will provide some channelling in times to come.

Jos still loves Princess AKA Fi Fi.

Princess Fi likes to spend days across the road sometimes.

She is so old, so old. Strange when I remember her as a kitten so long ago.

She didn't even want to come into my room to watch the street today.

Time Wise

She realises that She's not mentioning Stanley as often as a lordly cat deserves, but Stanley is doing very well. He sleeps in the Spare Room with Sylvio and Grace and none of them have participated in the mass breakouts through the broken window this past week.

Worried that I don't give them enough attention in the evenings, I went in with the brush to offer them some quality time. Sure, traipsing through the house and garden doing bits of work between computering, I meet and I greet and so on.

Until I was in the room I hadn't quite realised how clean the three cats are. They carefully use the tray, even tearing newspaper for extra coverage. They don't spray to mark their nightly possession of the place and none of them required the brushing which is applied to all the other cats as they shed their winter coats.

Last night only the basics were carried out  because as it turned out, it was one of those eventful evenings.

Firstly I found some tacks and nailed cardboard covering to the window both inside and out.

Lucibelle and The Greys were astonished.

Princess had demanded release and for the second night she disappeared. The previous night she'd not only escaped by herself but she made it across the road. With diminished hearing and sight, she probably felt the vibrations of the traffic times and the quiet times.

Yesterday was warm and I'd carried her across the road after their breakfast and my first cuppa. With the fussing around the window and other processes it was late when I went to bring her back here. She wasn't on the verandah or inside with Jos. Black Tom, invisible in the darkness, had mounted guard on Jos's verandah. I patted him and we had a conversation. Scrap was  with him and flitted into Jos's place as Jos and I spoke. Scrap visits Jos, but doesn't stay.

I went with the torch tccch tcching, the evening signal to call the cats. No sign, though Scrap came back with me and with an air of conferring enormous honour, accompanied me into my room to eat her dinner. She hissed and swore when I tried to pat her.

Why do we put up with such insults when cats begin to own us?

Back to the spare room to feed Stan, Grace and Sylvio.

A knocking at the door. Jos says Princess has turned up out of her hiding place and so I fetch her, wrapped carefully in her old blanket from Jos's place.

No complaints. 

Two late nights, she's tired, old thing. It's clear that when the medicine is working, she remembers being a young cat and even if she was never particularly brave, she likes to recall her ancestral heritage.

On balmy spring nights it can be understood why the little ones like to run free.

But a gap in household safety is like a gap to the spirit of all of us. When the window was agape, none of us were getting on very well. I thought of calling the Agent, but the window is my responsibility in this case. The handyman should be here this weekend. Last week the leaking roof and the dodgy electricals were fixed by the Agent and all feels good and getting better maybe.

(OK, in the old ten room house I rented way back when, with a window blown in by a gale, I could have called the owner in, but hard to believe, I was paying $10 per week rental for that place so generally, I sorted out repairs myself. It was good. Even car repairs were carried out by a neighbour in exchange for tutoring a daughter! Life was kinder there in those times. I'd leave the doors unlocked when I went to the city for study just in case any friends dropped by in need of a cup of tea.)

The back garden is delectable right now, a mass of pink Evening Primrose and the mauve Heliotrope is still blooming. The Elder is a mass of white flower and yesterday, to my amazement, I discovered that the Comfrey has begun to put out its Ashes of Roses coloured blooms.

It wasn't so long ago that Princess arrived unwell and unsteady on her feet, refused her tablets utterly and I had to dig out the just sprouting Comfrey from an almost bare winter garden for her medicine.

Another large house with good neighbours close by and an adult Anna to help with problems is a very good thing. Last week there were nightmares and restlessness everywhere. More recently the dreams are good and there's more hope in the world somehow.

My Poem is Published! Now for the Novel which is already written and boring to transcribe from hard copy, but there it is and here we are!

She Now Has Weight

The old order is rapidly changing.

After the delay to my dentals, deep work on the teeth is a necessity. Sometimes recovery can take quite a few days.

Frequently after treatments I get claustrophobic or horribly sick or lonesome.

On one such day last week, when I was behind in house work and self care and worried about how slowly my writing was proceeding, I packed my pen and my note book into the rucksack, changed my coat, applied lipstick and set out to the pub to try to get my straggling thoughts in order. 

(If I'm writing, I then may increase my potential to earn from work at home, or at least that's what I'm hoping!)

No point in saying I should have stopped to think things through. When I'm close to panic, there's no room for such an option in the hurrying brain.

At least the rush to an alternative universe worked some. 

I filled several pages of the blue notebook my mother gave me long ago which I'd previously used to note my work in music.

These days the blue book contains streams of consciousness, fragments of dream, literature and poetry while most work recalling music has become somewhat disbelieving.

Feeling calmer with a few words under my belt, I returned, as I believed to the computer, only to discover that I'd left my keys behind as I fled after inspiration.

Therefore I took the alternative option of access through the kitchen window, which is where I found that my bodily self is larger than it was.

I'd noticed that the boobs are a bit bigger. The kitchen window is narrow. Thankful for the small private backyard I took off bra and shirt as well as coat. The access previously was to curl and tuck in the bottom as I squeezed through to the bench inside. Once on the kitchen floor, I would then shut the window and return to the back verandah amid astonished cats to recover shoes, coat, bag, underwear or whatever else had had to be shed in order to gain the tricky access.

As I did the little turn necessary to bring the legs into the equation, there was suddenly more bottom than previous. The expected slide against the window glass didn't occur. The glass broke and the cats scattered. A small cut on the tummy meridean in front of the ankle was luckily my only injury. 

That cut healed fast, but the window is still broken and all our routines and procedures have been severely damaged ever since.

I now carry the spare key in my purse when I go out.

Anna has plans to bring a handyman in soon for some essential repairs, for some shifting of older furniture, much from the Daigon alley throwouts, to be replaced by newer things.

I've taped cardboard to the window. I've tacked cardboard to the window. I've piled planks and heavy obstacles against the window and every night since I inadvertently broke the window, my cats, so carefully shut inside each night have managed to escape into the warm spring evenings.

In a former place, where Anna spent much of her childhood, a window broke one stormy night. I measured the pane, I jumped into my car and drove to the hardware store where the friendly chap cut the glass to the right size and gave instructions on how to fix windows. He provided other necessities such as putty and linseed oil. 

That was a very old place, older even than this one. In those days, we were close enough to the ocean to get the full force of South Australia's Southerly gales from Antarctica. When I checked the other windows, it became apparent that the putty holding the glass in most of the windows had weathered to almost nothing, so I spent a few weeks cheerfully re-puttying all of the windows and the best thing about all that was that our windows ceased that terrifying storm rattle.

As to this situation, I have no car and I have no means and I broke the window so I have to wait.

I'm not much good at waiting (obviously). If I can't wait for my words to come back of their own accord and must hurry forth to find them, then that obviously shows a degree of intolerable impatience.

I remind myself that I'm still waiting to earn after all, and once I can earn again, perhaps there'll be less waiting for ordinary things like essential repairs and that new pair of black jeans I've been thinking of for awhile. 

I guess said jeans will have to be in a larger size by then and that is a surprising thought.