Relief

Princess Relaxes Despite Heat

She has to say,

It's so hot and Anna is away on holiday, bless her. We all miss her.

We have been looking closely at the forecasted weather and the forecasts were for much more  worsening hotness.

She went down the road too far for comfort to buy some cat milk after we all requested milk when She had Her morning cup of tea.

On that day it was 41 degrees and that was much too much but all the same She went out and bought Our Special Cat Milk which helps us feel cool.

She is working with the compost bin which Anna brought because much goes Off in this weather.

The new herbs and vegetables are being watered from the washing machine.

We heard her groaning, the forecast was for more hotness and we aren't allowed to water our gardens very much these days.

Then Tabs saw Her standing out front.

'Ants,' She said, 'There are a lot of ants,' she said.

'That says it will rain,' she said.

Late in this afternoon it began to rain.

It's still raining.

It's not cool rain.

The heavens are weeping for all the injustices of our land.

We have to cry on Australia Day, Invasion Day, the day of an eclipse.

Our fancy Astrologer said, 'Look to the heavens and if you see the eclipse there will be luck!'

She looked with us all to the heavens. It was grey but we felt good all the same because some of our garden will survive a bit longer..

Princess didn't even step onto the verandah to get away from the rain.

She lay on the footpath and her fur got wet.

Then She brought our Princess inside and Princess complained but later went to sleep on the cool bathroom tiles.

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!

Baby And The Stranger Cat

A Hiding Baby

Recently, Anna helped me with a big clean up of the kitchen. We moved stuff around and a mirror which had sat on the bench for some time, was shifted to rest against a book case until such time as it finds a new place. 

I hadn't realised that this would make such an impact on one Baby silver mackerel tabby cat.

The camera wasn't even to hand when Baby discovered that there was Another Cat staring at her full faced in aggressive mode from the mirror. Such an insult was not to be tolerated, and brave baby as she is, she launched herself at the offending feline. 

She was alarmed to meet cold glass and immediately investigated behind the mirror in order to deal with the the situation properly.

To her mystification, there were no cats of any description behind the glass. She emerged and again she saw That Cat and again she attacked and again the slippery feline had got away.

I was laughing so much that I was a bit helpless about it all for awhile.

Eventually I found the camera and was in time to catch a picture of a small Baby Cat safely in her hutch hiding from the intruder. 

Cat People Proper

Stanley Brings Breakfast.

I’d call Maria a Cat Lady and I’d name her so honourably. I met her several years ago outside our local Library in the days when I could manage more walking. I’d already noticed a healthy colony of cats in a nearby building who weren’t responsive to passers by. Then several weeks later I met Maria with her basket full of cat food. She was feeding this lot.

 

I asked her about them. It turns out that Maria ranges through three suburbs, visiting each one twice a week to leave food and organise vetinary work for the on heat and the sick among groups of ownerless cats. It’s a worry when the population gets out of hand. Life on the streets is cruel and awful for all stray creatures.

 

Maria is doing something about the problem and my cats won’t be joining hers.

 

I am a writer and a communicator who owns several cats. I am not a cat lady. Not all cat ladies are mad. It’s true that some people love cats well and not wisely but there are also those who care enough to take practical steps.

 

Sarah from Up The River is one of those. She’s taken on the task of paying vets to de-sex all her little local strays.

 

Cats are beautiful and they maintain their wildness. In Bondi I worried about our local birds because there weren’t so many protective trees. Eventually I saw more of the smaller birds killed by currawongs and magpies than by cats.

 

In our suburb, cats are put off birds by the harassments of Myna birds and the fact that we back onto a very long block reaching almost to our local partially cleaned river, and all the old houses have huge trees of all description, many with branches too closely woven for cats to enter.

 

When I first moved here there was an infestation of tall Night Jasmine trees growing along the side of the fence.

 

My friend John helped me get those trees out which was good because the roots had invaded the drain and were threatening the water pipe. The trees had been a gathering place for dawn songbirds and for a time I missed the early birdsong and the lovely shading patterns in my room from the afternoon sun. Eventually I put a hakea in. It’s well away from the pipes and it’s grown fast enough to cast pretty shadows into the room again. However, it’s too prickly for either bird or cat! Indeed, it’s almost too prickly to prune enough to maintain a path past it.

 

The dawn songbirds have moved to the native tree in the street outside.

 

I’ve seen an incredible variety of bird life here, more than I ever previously saw in a suburban environment. Yesterday, a little flock of yellow winged finches escaped the back yard as I let the cats out. I wish I could identify some of the others, but the bird book went during my time of homelessness.

 

On Sunday, as I saw Anna off on the bus, we noticed two Rosellas perched on nearby wires and no, we didn’t have our cameras.

 

Bob Just, who lives in Fern Rouge, densely inhabited by both people and cats, recently sent me these pictures of Rosella Jusef, a frequent visitor to his back yard. It’s Jusef’s relatives that Anna and I had noticed happily settled on the wires above. Bob who likes cats and who has previously owned some wonderful characters, says that these days he’s taken to watering cats who wander into his yard with the garden hose (for Jusef’s sake).