It is absurd to be writing this today, because I am on the last five days of a six-week house-sitting stint. I am living at Peaceable's neighbor's house -- 40 steps from front door to front door (have to walk around the snow drifts, or it would be fewer). They are in Italy, at an enviable writers-retreat at Bellagio, overlooking Lake Como. (I don't know the name of the place they are staying, but from her brief glowing email descriptions, this is similar). Mrs. Neighbor won the month-long retreat for her writing or her teaching (I can't remember which -- she wins a lot of prizes). These last two weeks, their college-aged daughters are with them and they are touring the country.
In the meantime, I am watching their cats. Another title for this blog post could be, More Cats I Have Slept With. Anyone who thinks cats don't have personalities, hasn't spent any time with a cat. All three of these cats are much nicer than my two, accepting and even-tempered.
Moo is the dominant cat of the family, a few months older than the other two. She is a Leader of the Band, and in temperament a lot like Fred. Moo is suffering cabin fever -- but the winter weather is not breaking, and every frigid night she takes one step out onto the concrete, then turns around in the doorway growling and hissing, and attacks her sisters.
Vince comes next in the pecking order. Vince, a Maine Coon, was a timid kitten, but large for her age (Maine Coons tend to run large, and have all that fur to pluff them out further) -- hence, the name for a Mafioso tough guy, which she has totally not lived up to. (She was thought to be male when they brought her home -- she's still referred to as "he" by the family, but she looks so like long-dead Maine Coons Maude and Natasha that she's definitely a she to me.) She is a Secret Admirer -- doesn't like to be held, but generally sits nearby for easy petting.
Hazel is bottom of the hierarchy. She mostly lives upstairs, and if allowed outside, scrambles immediately to the graveyard of birds and chipmunks under Peaceable's porch (graveyard to small birds and rodents, nirvana to carnivores). She is sweet-tempered and loving -- a Sidekick.
On Thursday, I move back to Peaceable's house. I won't promise to write another blog entry in the next weeks, but maybe I will.
Today, Mater, Bride and I went to the Peabody Essex Museum. A lovely building, housing open, airy atria between what feels like a few small buildings. It specializes in decorative art from early American colonial and post-revolutionary history, with an impressive collection of objects from the China trade which flourished in the vicinity.
My favorite exhibit is a complete Qing Dynasty house, Yin Yu Tang, (top) built a couple of centuries ago and lived in by one family for eight generations, and then brought piece by piece from the Huizhou region of China in 2002. After getting a private tour yesterday of our own ancestor's home, the John Whipple House (which I neglected to blog), I'd rather tough out life in the way of the Huang family than the Whipples (although the Whipple House is, to be fair, a couple hundred years older yet than the Yin Yu Tang house -- I'm not sure enough of Chinese History to be able to say whether the comforts of the late 18th century in China had improved much since the early 17th century). (They improved a lot, here.)
The Peabody was also showing Iris Apfel: All Fired Up! an exciting clothing exhibit. Or, maybe I should call it a costume exhibit: the private wardrobe of Iris Apfel, an apparently well-known Interior Designer. Her clothes sense is unique, to say the least - bold colors and shapes, ranging from haute couture to ethnic costume to flea market finds, accessorized to the Nth degree by multiple bulky necklaces, heavy wrist cuffs, and huge round glasses. She fairly often would design matching shoes or boots to be made in Italy. None of us would wear the jewelry (Mater and I didn't like much of it at all, Bride liked it but thought it too heavy to wear), but we noticed that the shoes were all sensible (never a high heel and usually round- or square-toed -- comfortable looking, even if hand made out of antique paisley shawls to match a coat found at a flea market in England).
Most of the clothes shown were from the 1980s through the 2000's, when Iris was in her 60's to 80's -- this is a woman who has not let age slow her down or change her "look".
In keeping with the general fun sense of the exhibit, there is an accompanying Runway show that you all can play, too. Click here, and you can select items from Iris's wardrobe and mix them up on the models anyway you like. To get the true Apfel flavor, remember to layer the necklaces, and occasionally wear a brooch as an earring.
I was inspired to create the outfits above. The one on the left is actually her "travel outfit" with matching luggage, crafted from tiger-stripe upholstery her own weaving company produced. The outfit on the right features a piece that Bride "must have, now" -- the skirt, which is an historic artifact coincidentally from the Qing Dynasty, worn here with a 1980's sweater set, and layers of necklaces. It's fun -- I recommend playing!
Over a week ago, Dog and I took a very long walk, down to the Ipswich River, and around and up and across a bridge and back home again. She was limping by the end of it, but uncomplaining, and seemed to enjoy it. The next day we had a heavy snowfall, and we haven't been on such a long walk since, due mostly to lack of street room on which to walk (the plowed snow covering the shoulders, and there are few sidewalks). Today brought heavy rains -- also not much fun to walk in -- but it does mean that it should be clear enough to take Dog of out again.
Cranky and Bride returned last night, delivered from the airport by Son of, who drove up from Woods Hole. I take his visit entirely personally, since CoG and Bride are taking Mater down to visit him next weekend after I leave -- so this was the only opportunity for the two of us to meet up.
Thank you, Son of!
Anyway, we have had a full day of doing little but eating, talking, eating, drinking tea and coffee and talking more, then eating more, while Cranky and Bride begin to get over jet lag.
Crows have been mustering on the snow-covered lawn the whole time I've been house-sitting. They cluster in the trees, and then fly down en masse to attack the snow under the bird feeders (picking up the sunflower seeds there). If I walk up to the picture window, or to the glass door onto the back deck -- even though I'm inside the house and mostly just a moving dark shadow to them -- they rise up in a scattering of black, cawing and crying and they return to the trees for a while. They are wonderful.
When I took this photo, during a snowstorm last weekend, I found I had to keep recounting crows. "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Nine crows... No, did that one move? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Ten crows. But that one there, bobbing its head -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Yes, definitely eleven crows. Wait, what's that black spot--?" Ultimately, I decided there were 12. Or rather, I stopped recounting at 12.
Another day, this one sunny and melty, I let the Cat out the glass door onto the deck overlooking the bird feeders. A few minutes later, I wandered back to the door to check on him. As I approached, there was flapping and a surge of motion just outside. A red-tailed hawk winged up and off towards the horizon, starting not four feet away from me (beyond the glass door) -- dropping a black shadow with a light thump on the deck. I had interrupted a kill, either just above the door (and falling to ground by the weight of the catch) or brought to the deck to eat.
For a heart-stopping moment, I thought the dark shadow lying on the deck, about a foot long and still as death, was Cat of. But the black angles sorted themselves through my panicked mind into feathers and a beak -- it was one of the crows. I waited for a couple of hours (and consulted Son of, who is a bird expert) before concluding that the hawk was not going to come back to finish his lunch, and that the crow was really and truly dead.
Somewhat gruesomely, depending upon how much experience you have with collecting bird bodies (I have quite a bit, due ahem to the whole Cattus Dommus thing) -- I carefully wrapped the crow up in a black bag, marked it well, and thrust it to the very bottom of Bride's large freezer in the cellar. Son of wants a crow skull, and now he can get one, perfectly preserved. The great surprise, which shouldn't have been, was how light the corpse was. A creature that large should weigh more (cats do, for instance). But of course, cats don't fly.
Cranky and the Bride belong to one (more than one, actually) of these local places like a CSA -- a farm that you buy shares in, and then get a share of the produce. I say "like a CSA" because in the case I'm discussing today, it's not kale and celeriac, but fish and seafood shares. Today I drove up to a truck parked in the driveway of a nearby farm (by arrangement) and picked up about 10 lbs of fresh-caught shrimp.
Fresh-caught. Not, thank the lord, alive still, but only just-dead. Very fresh. But also very straight-from-the-sea. Cranky jokingly commanded me over the phone from England that they expected the shrimp cleaned, deveined, shelled, and frozen in single use packets -- funny, except that is what I had intended to do before the command anyway.
Per shrimp, it wasn't that much work, but 10 lbs is a lot of shrimp. Cleaning them required twisting the heads off, and then removing the eggs from under their legs and tail shell. The eggs were the surprise, and the hard part.
I didn't know shrimp had eggs. I mean, yeah, I kinda knew, but I've never seen it before. Until the guy at the shrimp truck referred to them, I just thought the shrimp were dirty. If you look in the photo (whole shrimp on the left, tails in the "basket" on top -- eggs still intact, and heads on the right) you can see the darkening in the tail area. Not the vein, but eggs -- thousands and thousands of shrimp roe, a quite beautiful silvery teal blue. On the very last pound I finally figured how to clean them out -- squeeze the shrimp as if you were rolling a cigar, and then rinse (rinsing straight just separates the eggs and drives them into the corners and under the shell). (And later I wondered if shrimp roe isn't a great delicacy and I just flushed a ton of it down the drain? If so, oops, sorry, Cranky and Bride.)
98% of these shrimp were females, judged by the presence of eggs. (I don't know shrimp anatomy or sexual characteristics, so I'm taking the layman's view: eggs = female.) A brother-in-law of mine was once studying Buddhism, and he told me that in Buddhist theory, if you have to eat meat, it is better to eat something like a cow, than something like shrimp. This is because in the former case, merely one life (the cow's) is taken to feed many people; whereas in the latter case, to feed one person, many shrimp's lives must be taken.
As I flushed out the thousands and thousands of eggs today, I thought about that, and wondered if maybe these shrimp were caught in the midst of breeding season? Are we massacring a whole generation of shrimp (it wasn't just me picking up 10 lbs. of little beings)? I assume not. I assume that this is a sustainable fisherman, hence the selling by shares and truckloads rather than just to the local grocer. But such a lot of lives.
I packed the shrimp into freezer bags of 1.5 lbs each, and saved a gallon of shrimp heads because one of the cookbooks recommended using them for fish stock. I saved a serving out for myself, but after an afternoon of twisting heads off and metaphysical thoughts, I decided upon cheese pizza instead.
To end on a surreal note, here's the official music video of the song running through my mind all afternoon, Fish Heads, by Barnes & Barnes (1979).
Tuckered out by our adventure of yesterday, Dog of was not interested in a walk until after dark this evening. Street lamps are dim, few and far between in this rural town, so we chose to walk south along the quieter street. The air smells of melting snow; the jet stream is moving north and tomorrow promises highs in the low 40°s.
I slept badly last night -- maybe too much espresso. It occurred to me as I lay awake, listening to the odd clicks and rhythmic creaks of the house, that I'm not frightened at night here. The doors lock, but there's glass right next to the handle, so that's a trivial obstacle for a professional. The surrounding area is dark, good for getaways. There is a dog, but she's so deaf she'd only react after being tripped over. I don't know most of the neighbors, and cars speed down this street to busier streets nearby all the time. Yet I'm never spooked.
But tonight, in the starlit darkness between street lamps (which is to say, pretty durn dark), I realized that I could hear wolves howling. There's a wolf preserve about a mile from the Heartbreak House, if that far. They were making long hulloos, with lots of little yips chiming in (pups?). (You can hear something like it, without the yips, on the home page of the preserve by clicking here: Wolf Hollow.) It was a happy, convivial sound, of creatures communicating, sharing, celebrating. Glad to be alive and in the pack, and glad to tell everybody about it.
I like wolves -- HOWL (Help Our Wolves Live) was the first progressive group I was ever a proud, card-carrying member of (although I joined because my big brother did, and because we thought our pet husky was 1/4 wolf). I know that wolves don't attack without provocation. I know that these wolves are in a compound with 8-foot walls, and have daily human interaction. But those howls tickled the back of my neck; there seemed to be danger in the dark. I found myself thinking of werewolves, dancing around a fire (because even my subconscious knows I have more to fear from humanoids than from wolves). I found myself welcoming the occasional car on the road, and wishing more people had lights on their mailboxes.
I reminded myself that even though I could hear them, they were clearly at a distance. The time to worry, with creatures in the night, is when you can't hear them -- that's when you don't know where they are. Even so, Dog of and I returned home not long after.
Today was colder than yesterday -- dropped below the "crisp" temperatures, into "downright uncomfortable" temperatures, even though it was again sunny. (By midwestern standards formed over the last two weeks, it was balmy -- in the 20's F.) The back garden, showing an edge of the new deck, and the frozen expanse down to the pond and the wetlands beyond. We had the usual array of birds at the feeders: sparrows and chickadees, of course, but also blue jays and titmouses (titmice?). In the lower photo, I serendipitously caught a sparrow flying in, and if you look closely, you'll see a red-headed flicker on the bird feeder, taking suet.) Today we didn't get the muster of crows we've had the last couple of days.
Dog of and I attempted to walk into town -- only a mile away -- on the flimsy excuse that I would buy milk or a coffee. We didn't make it. Over half way there, just as you pass the Whipple House, the road curves, turning -- in that old-fashioned New England way -- from a city street into a state highway in the space of a few meters. Cars zoomed past in a steady flow. The shoulders of the roads (there are few sidewalks), normally narrow gravel paths, are piled three feet high with crusty, greasy, salt-encrusted snow, studded with dark ice chunks like broken beer bottles in a garbage bag. I could trudge on top of it in my snow boots, but arthritic old Dog of absolutely refused. She kept pulling into the traffic lane, regardless of the speeding SUVs (she's quite deaf, so has no fear).
Nervous for her safety, and tired of pulling a reluctant dog through the cold, we returned home. I can't tell about Dog of, but I have been bone-cold chilled ever since, despite layers of thermal underwear, wool, and fleece.
Heartbreak is heated by a central oil-burning furnace, but I think that's mostly backup these days. The main source of heat is a fantastic pellet stove. Cranky and Bride have had one for a few years, but this is a new one, thermostatically controlled. (I think I mentioned in an earlier post.) You get the cozy sense of a fire -- I mean, there actually is a fire -- but you don't have to muck about with logs and embers, and making sure it has enough air, or if the flue is open. Instead, it operates on wood pellets, poured in through a door in the top (so, sure, every couple of hours you do have to feed it, like logs, but you just pour a scoop or three in and you're done).
A fan blows hot air out into the room through the rectangular openings along the top of the stove. The hinges along the front edge open the grate, but you can't get at the fire -- there's a thick piece of glass behind it. (The front does open -- but it is the whole front, not what you'd expect from the photo -- for cleaning once a week. There is ash, but it is very fine, and much less than you get from burning wood.)
The pellets also offer an additional decorating opportunity -- sitting in an old copper feed bucket alongside the fire.
The back wall of the main area of the stove is decorated with a set of vertical ridges, crowned with a diamond that frames what I think is meant to be a stylized flame. Under the diamond is a gaping hole -- the chute down which the pellets spill, feeding the fire below.
I have set up my laptop on a table a few feet away (as I showed in an earlier post). Sitting there, looking over at the stove, the design on the back appears to me like an ash-covered gargoyle or primitive fire dæmon, sucking in the flames and shooting out heat. It's quite comforting, actually.
I haven't written much about Cat of. He's a black Maine Coon cat (read: rangy, long-haired, huge platter eyes -- the kind you see in Halloween pictures, with tufts of extra fur between his toes and the tips of his ears). I haven't written much about him because he is, I say with no false modesty, in his own form of Cat Heaven, so he hasn't interacted with me much during the day. Cat of, not long after I arrived, recognized a kindred spirit (read: a personal human slave). I am far more cat-centric than Cranky and Bride of (not that they don't like the Cat, just they are more Dog People than Cat People, whereas I am more Cat Person than Dog Person).
Being in Cat Heaven means, to a cat, sleeping in a heated bed, eating fresh food, and being petted on command. Since Saturday evening, Cat of has spent 23 hours a day sleeping on my bed (which happens to have heated mattress pad, although I only turn it on for a couple hours, to warm the sheets). The remaining hour is taken up with brief ablutions, and then a quick visit to the food bowl (kept fresh by the slave). I have also taken the Furminator to him, which fortunately he enjoys (my own cats don't) so his fur is particularly glossy and smooth. The rest of the time, he is to be found in my room -- where I am not, except at night.
Travel over for three weeks, I am now ensconced at Heartbreak House (so named for the road it is fronts, not any emotional entanglements). Cranky and his Bride (aka CoG and Bride of) were dropped at the airport a few hours ago, and at the moment they are in the air somewhere over the Atlantic.
The house has been substantially remodeled since I was here last, less than a year ago -- what used to be a dark narrow hallway, a half-used central parlor and a long narrow kitchen has been opened out into a large flowing room with kitchen on one side, parlor on the other and a nice little table along one edge. During daylight hours the room is bright and cheery; in the evening (when these photos were taken) it is cozy and welcoming. Based on current preferences, I expect I'll be using this little table, next to the thermostat-controlled pellet woodstove, facing large southeastern windows, as my primary hangout.
In the way of these things, the improvement of this room means that the living room on the other side of the fireplace is now largely unused, despite the renovations making it quite a bit warmer and more comfortable to sit in. In gaining a living area, they've lost a living area (but this is better). So to speak.
Dog of and I seem to be communicating well (she barks, I give her treats, she eats them). Cat of is thrilled to be allowed to sleep with a human (and I'm thrilled to let him, missing my own winter bed warmers).
