Giggling Gophers and Gutt

          I’ve been plagued with gophers this summer, like every other summer here at Happy House Farm.  Usually I employ a gopher getter who traps for me $10 a gopher or mole.  I think it’s a great deal, but at the start of summer he had carpal tunnel surgery, so I was left to fend for myself.

          At the beauty salon when I was bemoaning my gopher hole-decorated lawn and garden, another patron, getting her marroon hair spiked, tipped me off to a device called a Molecat that whacks the little buggers in the head so they die of a concussion.  She had dispatched 26 moles with it the summer before.  She told me where to buy one and I bought one.  I set it up and waited.  I waited a long time.  Nothing seemed to have happened.  Finally, when I was done waiting, I removed the Molecat from the hole and a horrid stench somewhat like dead skunk followed.  I guess something happened down there in that hole after all.

          In the meantime, I wrote to my sister of my Molecatting experience, once again griping of my lawn and garden full of holes and hills.  I received a card in the mail from Gopher Contracting Services.  On the front were six dancing gophers.  When I opened it, they giggled and sang, “Have a dee-da-dee-da-doe-doe day!”  They wrote, “Have a carrot crunching, beet munching, radish slurping, plant burping, happy-dappy, eating your garden day!  The address they used was my sister’s, so I wrote back to warn her that the gophers had stolen her identity.  If there’s one thing I won’t tolerate, it’s gopher fraud.

“Dear Sister:

This is to inform you that your home address has been hacked.  "Gopher Contract Services" just sent me a musical card using your address.  If you hear knocking, do not open your door, especially if you see no one when you look out the glass at the top of the door.  The little shits will probably bite your toes off before you know what hit you.

I’m told my gopher hit man is back in business and their day is coming.  I am looking up gopher stew recipes this very moment on the internet.  This former Brownie/Girl Scout is going to be prepared.”

Not too much later, I received her response via e-mail:

“Dear Sister: ~

I have neither been a Brownie or a Girl Scout ~ so I had a very sleepless night wondering what I was going to do should I hear that fateful knock on my door.  I do so love my toes, even though they are gnarly and crooked.

Then suddenly, as luck would have it, I had an epiphany in the middle of the night and took action first thing this morning.

Knowing Elmer specializes in only in pesky rabbits, I researched on the internet and found that his cousin, Gutt Fudd, focuses mainly on giggly gophers.  I gave this "well preserved" gopher grabber a call. 

Thankfully, he was literally at my door waiting for me when I got home from work.  He assures me he will be ever vigilant, right outside my door, until "Gopher Contract Services" has been extinguished for good.

Thank you so much for the warning!  I have enclosed two pictures of Gutt, so you too can be assured that I am safe.

Love as always!”

I have attached one of the photos so you can see Elmer Fudd’s brother, Gutt.  I’m reassured that my sister is well-protected, at least from the gophers.  I don’t know who will protect her from Gutt.

I have re-set the Molecat and stuck it in the middle of a line of holes that runs up my front sidewalk every summer.  I am waiting.  Nothing seems to have happened but I’m almost done waiting.  Just in case the Molecat's whack of death has worked, I have a clothespin for my nose.  Just in case it hasn’t worked, I have my gopher getter on speed dial.  Tomorrow, I’m giving him a call.

Pretty Miss Emma

     Miss Emma pads after me from room to room on her soft white feet, regarding everything I do, each aspect of daily routine—dishes, laundry, meal preparation—sometimes napping while I write or pay bills.  She scampers after invisible mice up over the top of the sofa and back down while I cook dinner, yelling her throat yippee.

     Would you say females are the same in every species?  That would explain why she is most attentive when I arrange my hair and apply makeup, intent on memorizing each wrist action, arm motion and selection of appliance.  I include my little girlfriend by combing the top of her head as a finish to my ablutions, proclaiming, “Pretty girl!”  She likes me to say this, I think, hunching her back, pleased.  “Look at pretty Emma,” I invite, picking her up, holding her face toward the mirror.  She adopts an attitude of insouciance as only cats can do, gazing everywhere but the mirror. 

     Yet, when I am busy making the bed, I notice her seated on the bathroom counter, facing the mirror, assuring herself, “Pretty Emma!  Pretty Emma Kitty!”

The White Rabbit

          Sun, a luxurious rarity, appeared in our coastal valley and I took advantage to plant some perennials under the new trellis arbor in our back hedge, hoping they would wind and grow over the summer.  As I crouched over and planted, I concentrated on the task of digging and composting and setting each plant just so.  I looked up and to my left I saw from the corner of my eye something white.  Standing to better see, I realized a white rabbit was in the hedge, nibbling the leaves of a forsythia. 

          First I checked to make sure I was still in this earthly realm and not in the stage play of Harvey.  I knew I hadn’t ingested anything more than a fruit smoothie for breakfast.  I had added a tablespoon full of dried greens but was quite sure no hallucinogens were along for the ride.  Watching for a moment, I determined there actually was a white rabbit in my hedge, even though I was not raising any white rabbits.

          How it came to be there in our back yard that is sometimes home to coyotes, hawks, turkey vultures, dogs, horses, deer, nutria, skunks and our own cats—a whole assortment of domestic and wild creatures that would find a white rabbit pesky or tasty, indeed—was a mystery to me.  Since it was white, I reasoned that it also was domestic and probably someone’s pet.

          I tested my theory by talking to the rabbit about this and that.  The rabbit’s ears perked up and he looked at me, nose twitching.  He didn’t run away.  He had abandoned the forsythia for some of my annuals in his quest for breakfast.

          Hoping he would hop away into someone else’s yard, I returned my focus to my work at hand.  Looking up later and glancing around, I saw the rabbit had come closer and was now taking a siesta in the rugosa rose patch alongside our deck.

          Yes, he was cute, but I envisioned a gigantic-toothed creature a few months from now gorging himself on everything planted in my vegetable garden so nothing would be left for my freezer, and I wanted him gone.  For a micro-second I thought about whacking him with my shovel and thereby ending his voracious foraging of my plant matter but at the same moment I knew I was a pacifist at heart and had to find some other way of getting him to where he belonged, alive.

          Plucking the soil-encrusted cell phone from my pocket, I called my neighbor Sara to ask if it was her white rabbit.

          “No.”

          “Well, I have one in my back yard, so I was calling to check. Do you want a white rabbit?”

          “I just had surgery.  The last thing I want right now is a rabbit to take care of.  Now if it was horses in your yard you were calling about, those would be ours, but not rabbits.”

          Or a dog, I thought, because Sara’s dog is always over here, too, as part of her daily rounds.

          After wishing her a speedy recovery, I continued pondering the ownership of my Leporidae friend, who contrary to the title of John Updike’s first Rabbit novel, was not running anywhere, but instead munching where I stood, on my newly-planted blue-flowered veronica.

          That made me consider the shovel solution again, and it was so handy, even, but I remembered that my buddy Ben at the head of the lane raised rabbits for a 4-H project, so I called his number.  He was in school, but his mom, Katy, answered.

          “Do you have a white rabbit?” I asked.

          Silence.  Then a big, long sigh.

          “Yes.   We’ve been trying to catch him for two weeks.”

          “He’s here, eating all my plants.  He’s been here for several days, pulling up everything I’ve newly planted.  I had thought it was deer, but now I know.”

          “I have to go to work in 15 minutes.  Can you catch him?”

          To myself I allowed as his retrieval was not really my problem.

          “I have to be leaving soon myself.  I don’t have time either.”

          Katy began a diatribe of  how she hated all the animals her children have for their various projects, how they all get out of their confines, how she or her husband have to take care of them most of the time—all the things any mother of kids with 4-H animals says at one time or another.

          My brain started thinking about catching that rabbit instead of listening to Katy, since I’d heard or said all that before.  Besides, having no flowers or food for winter was my problem and I needed to solve it now rather than later.  I knew I’d have to be slow, graceful and cagey.  I began speaking to the rabbit again, conversationally.  My conversational skills often appear to lull others into waking coma and maybe that would work on this rabbit, too.

          I tossed my cell down on the lawn behind me, the neighbor still lamenting, and in the same move swayed over and down, grabbing the rabbit by its ears.  At first he didn’t move at all, and then he tried, but I hung on tightly.  When he realized he was captured, he squealed.  Piercingly.  Like a tortured cat.  Sara’s dog, who was on the other side of the hedge instead of home in her yard, began barking.  The rabbit squealed all the louder. 

          “Go home!” I yelled at the dog.  For once it worked and she trotted off.

          “I caught the rabbit!” I hollered into the phone which was still transmitting.  If the neighbor didn’t know that, she had to be deaf.  The rabbit shrieked again.  “Bring the cage!  I’m waiting.”

          “On my way,” Katy said.

          All the blood rushed to my head as I stood, one hand around the ears and one on the back of the rabbit.  I hoped I wouldn’t faint before Katy arrived and just in the nick of time I heard her tires spin on our driveway gravel. 

          “Where are you, where are you?” she shouted.

          “Over here, over here!” I rejoined.  The woman in a red sweatshirt hunched over, in the midst of a head rush, holding onto the ears of a squealing white rabbit, alongside a hedge just beginning to leaf out.  Not exactly invisible.

          Just then Katy holding a cage appeared around the corner of the arbor, and we wrangled the rabbit into its cage and latched the door.  I retrieved my phone, turned it off, and stood up, gulping air.

          More conversational lamentations about children and unwanted animal husbandry ensued on Katy’s part to which I didn’t listen and more delineation of damages accrued by unwanted munching mandibles ensued on my part to which Katy didn’t listen, until, realizing she had to get to work, Katy said another thank-you and I said good-bye.

          The day seemed so quiet after that.  I worried about the trauma that poor white rabbit must have suffered and I hoped his memory was short-lived and waking up from his next sleep he would remember nothing but grass, lettuce, and pellets.  I worried about my momentary lapse in pacifism and the proposed assault against one of God’s creatures, if only in my mind.

          I wrote my sister Susie about the day’s events.

          The next day, I received three e-mails.  I will replicate them here for you:

         

Dear Bunny Whisperer ~

I've heard of your excellent talent at rangling bunnies and was inquiring about your fees.  It seems I'm having a hard time capturing enough bunnies to keep me satisfied these days.  Old age, sagging parts, etc.  are making my "wants" difficult, thereby making my reputation as the "master bunny keeper" falter.  So I'm turning to you, as a shrewd bunny rangler, to hop to my aid.

Awaiting your response ~ Hugh Hefner 

Dear Rabbit Rangler:

Tales of your successfuly rabbit rangling have been a floatin' through the air. 

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I'm in need of your services. 

I've been trying for years to catch that rascally rabbit, Bugs Bunny, without success.

He's made a fool of me for the last time! 

Please meet me in the woods as soon as possible.

Elmer Fudd

Dear Garden Lady:

I wanted to let you know that I'm mad at you.

Here I was, minding my own business yesterday, when you engaged me into a conversation.

Now, I'm not one to be tricked easily, but you appeared to be a nice lady and I just couldn't resist your charms.

Ha!  Some schmuck I am, huh?  Not only did you pull my ears, but you intentionally ratted me out to the guards ~ who as you know came and locked me up again!

Well, here's a warning, Miss not so nice garden lady ~ I will escape again (cause that's how I roll) AND I will be back!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot ~ Just a clue ~ if you don't want company ~ quit puttin' out the appetizers!!

Your friend no more ~ Peter Cottontail

I think I will keep my shovel handy.  What do you think? 

Maybe I should go ask Alice.  I think she'll know.

ADDENDUM:

This arrived from my friend Linda Nygaard who is an excellent cook.

Should he reappear: 

Lapin A La Cocotte

Servings: 2-3

• 1 (2 1/2 lb) rabbit, quartered
• 3 slices bacon, cut in thirds
• 1 1/2 cups sliced onions
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 1 cup beef broth
• 1/4 cup red wine
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 2 teaspoons dried parsley
• 2 bay leaves
• salt and pepper

Directions:

Prep Time: 20 mins

Total Time: 1 1/2 hrs

1. 1 In a large skillet or medium-sized Dutch oven, cook bacon until done; remove bacon with a slotted spoon and reserve for another use (for a salad, etc).
2. 2 In the bacon drippings, cook the onion and garlic until transparent. A.
3. 3 dd the rabbit pieces and saute over medium heat until rabbit is golden.
4. 4 Sprinkle on the flour and continue to brown rabbit for another 5 minutes or so, then add the beef broth, red wine, thyme, parsley and bay leaves.
5. 5 Cover and simmer over low heat for about an hour, adding more broth if necessary. Salt and pepper to taste (with the bacon drippings, not much salt is needed). Serve with mashed potatoes or buttered egg noodles.

ANOTHER ADDENDUM from Sally Hendry:

Dear Ms. Close,
Please send undercover investigators straight away to Tillamook, Oregon, USA.  Apprehension of "muse of south prairie" should be easy (see her blog of May 22, 2011 for ID & MO info) & mind assimilation into our order a snap as you recount loudly per manual at close range screaming with the usual spit spray her recent indecencies on our latest refugee (Case #5261, white domestic male, identifying characteristic of unusually long, deformed ears).  After submission, have her write the usual brief explanation to her kin; we will expect investigators/apprehenders (employ the local Navy Seals if needed) with this muse back at the sanctuary in good time.  She will serve her sentence of life without parole in our Gracious-Green -Alfalfa Pellet Compound grooming & otherwise being supplicants to our more elderly inhabitants, eventually engaging in one-on-one Forgiveness Therapy with  Case 5261 as her trauma decreases.
Again my congratulations & heartfelt appreciation for your recent series Damages wherein you cleverly & powerfully manipulate your fellow humans by mentally & physically prevailing  over the weak.  However, no stew  pot is too small nor fire too puny to deliver the ultimate coup de grace.
Harvey III
Sanctum Hareum
Brisbane, Austrailia

The Tie That Binds, A Mother's Day Offering

        Thirty years ago, I wrote an essay about how just because a child is a step-child, your attachment to each other is not less than if she was a birth child.  I learned that much in my first ten years with my step-daughter.  Something not having to do with blood ties bound us together from the start.

        Six months after my first marriage, lying in my back yard against the vinyl siding of our tiny house, I was pondering the deplorable state of our union and sobbing, when my six year-old step-daughter found me.  No words were exchanged but somehow she knew what was taking place in my mind and heart. 

“You can’t leave us,” she told me.  “You made a vow for better or for worse.”  Who knew those six year-old ears were listening and understanding the wedding ceremony?  Even though it was “for worse” the next ten years, and life was not kind to either of us, it would have been worse for her had I gone, and so I stayed.  That decision was the knot at the beginning of our umbilical cord.

Twenty years after that, an odd incident stunned me.  I was in L.A., visiting my friend Jerry, who set up a reading for me with a fortune teller, a friend of his.  She read her Tarot cards and did her magic, all of which I can either accept or not, usually.  She intoned her spiel and I sat there, dumbfounded.

Nothing she said pertained to me one whit.  Instead, every single thing she saw related to the events taking place in my step-daughter’s life, down to the most minute detail.  How could that be?  I felt like a character in The Revenge of the Bodysnatchers.  It was as if her energies had taken up residence in the spiritual home of me.  In my mind, I saw a painting of a hollowed-out body—a pod—with my step-daughter ensconced inside, a symbiosis of the highest order.

When I explained what had happened to the fortune teller, she was as amazed as I.  She said she had heard of these things happening before but never witnessed it in her own work.  “Your step-daughter is really attached to you,” she said.  “You two have a strong connection.”

What seems odd is that while my birth son has not usurped the “me” in me—yet—a child not of me had at that moment, at least, overcome me.  That kind of transformation I can only explain, if I must, as Divine interference.

This year my step-daughter took charge of her own life and made changes the fortune teller said needed making and predicted would happen.  My step-daughter’s life is now on a different and self-determined course.  I applaud her courage in altering her path which will include service to others, which has always been her main strength.  I can’t help thinking that if I saw the fortune teller again, my reading would show a totally different result, devoid of my step-daughter’s spirit.

Or maybe not.  Maybe a mother fills up with the energies of her children and they are there to stay, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, depending on their need.   Experiences in my life have taught me there is a tie that binds with knots that cannot be undone, linking us to those whom we love, those who go for a time with us and then after us.

Create Harmony, Feed the Plants

I’ve had little time for reading this week, but what I’ve read (some of it re-reading) has been rich and worth sharing.

First, a quote from Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest:  “I’m an ass, you’re an ass.”  Here’s what James F. Twyman, author of The Proof, says about that:  “…it instantly allows us to be more compassionate and acknowledge that we all have issues…we’re all asses sometimes…we’re all enrolled in this Earth School to learn, expand, and heal, then we begin to set aside our complaints, our need to always be right.  We begin to embrace ourselves and others in ways that offer healing instead of greater separation.”

He goes on to say, “If you allow your grievance to control you, you engage in the losing battle of constantly perceiving threats and attacking.  Your actions, choices, and behaviors reflect this illusion; and you begin operating in a world of separation.  You create stories about the ‘bad others’ to assign blame and relieve the pain of your isolation…It’s your choice whether to surrender the nightmare of your self-created separation for healing or to continue to suffer in the darkness.”

This is a big lesson I continue to need to work on and it’s no coincidence I found it again, today, all full of a grievance I suffered last week.  I want to remember that I’m much happier filling up with Love than hurt and blame.

Gary Zukav presents much the same lesson in his Soul Stories, which I’ve been reading a little every day.  “Authentically empowered people forgive naturally.  They forgive because they do not want to carry the burden of not forgiving like heavy suitcases through a crowded airport…Have you ever thought that someone treated you badly, and then thought about it again and again?  How did that make you feel?  Were you angry, or sad, or frightened?...Until you forgive, you cannot use all of your creativity.  Part of you is thinking about what you have not forgiven.  Do you want to live your life that way?  Is it worth it?  Is anything worth that?  Forgiveness and harmony go together.  When you forgive someone, nothing stands between you and that person.  Even if the person you forgive does not like you, you have laid your suitcases down…Put down one suitcase at a time.  That is how you create harmony.  It is also how you forgive.”

Again, that I read these two things in the same time frame can be no coincidence.  I need to work, work, work that lesson.

How can I do that?  Gary Zukav tells the story of a Hawaiian shaman who explained how by saying that the most important thing of all is to bless everyone all of the time.  He was certain that there is something about everybody that you can find to bless; that if you look for it, you will find it.

“Just in case, I am going to give you an emergency blessing.  You can use it if you can’t find one thing about someone to bless…Tell yourself…His exhalation feeds the plants.”

Gary Zukav added another emergency blessing for good measure.  “This person is bringing me a lesson that is very important for me to learn.  If it were not for this person, I might not be able to learn it.”

These readings passed by my eyes for a reason and I’m paying attention.  Now I’m going outside, since it’s mostly sunny today, and pull weeds in my flower beds.  Working in the yard gives me a feeling of accomplishment and time to ruminate on the lessons the Universe has presented to me.  And since, indeed, I am sometimes an ass, I will be blessing myself and my exhalations will be feeding the plants.

blog 4NWP

I am stunned and dismayed by all the political attacks against teachers and education programs this spring, instigated by those who say out one side of their mouths education is important and needs more funding, and then out the other side of their mouths defund what they say should be improved.  Huh?  Am I living in the Brave New World?  1984, with all this Doublespeak?

March 2, President Obama signed a bill to keep the government running, a bill which cuts $4 billion in spending from the FY 2011 budget.  This in effect eliminates the National Writing Project among other education programs.  Out of all the instructional courses I pursued in my 33-year career as a high school language arts instructor, none was so beneficial as my month-long Writing Project workshop.

Up until that time, I hadn't known how to teach writing with any degree of proficiency, because truly, I had never been taught the process.  In high school, we students learned no process.  We were assigned to read the models of the various types of essays and then were assigned to write one of our own, with very little instruction about how to go about that.  The models were boring, the subject matter nothing that would interest a high-school aged reader or writer.  Sometimes the texts suggested topics and those were even more deadly to the young, creative mind.  When the papers came back from the instructor, there was one humongous grade slapped on the top.  The errors in punctuation, grammar, spelling, and usage were marked, but usually nothing that detailed structure, transitional elements, voice, exploration of topic or any of the other skills a writer usues to engage a reader's senses. 

In college, this pattern continued, and still we didn't know why we received the grade plopped on the top of the paper.  (Neither did the teachers, most of the time, as we discovered if we asked them why that particular grade was given.)  What grade would be there was a veritable crapshoot.  Even if we were allowed to edit and return the paper, we weren't taught how to improve the paper, how to revise. 

The first part of my career I taught the way that had been modeled to me.  I didn't like it, frustrated because I didn't know how to improve my instruction.  I glommed on to whatever I could find out there in that lessonplan-osphere.

That changed the summer of 1986 when I took the Writing Project Workshop at University of Oregon under the tutelage of Nat Teich.  We had instruction every morning, and sharing every afternoon.   All 25 of us had brought a lesson plan that we knew worked and we shared that with the other 24 students.  I came away from that workshop knowing how to teach writing with the added bonus of 24 possible lesson plans.  If I couldn't use one, I shared it with a colleague who could.  I shared the instructional material with the colleagues who wanted to learn.  I informed my school district about the Writing Project.  Other colleagues went to the Writing Project summers and some to smaller week-long seminars.  The teaching of writing improved in our district, as I'm sure it improved in other districts across the state.

I'm saddened to learn that something that works may be no more, that teachers searching for methods of improvement will have to keep looking, that students won't have the educational foundation they need to pass the state benchmarks for writing, that they won't find the joy of using language to create a better world.

What remarkable lack of forethought by our government, the one that's supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people.

Epiphany

I read this poem today in the Writers’ Almanac and realized I now have a word for what I’ve been feeling since my husband’s heart attack last year.  Dread.

Passage

by Marilyn Donnelly

He who
took the steps
by two
now pauses
on each tread
and I
who love him so
am filled
with dread.

"Passage" by Marilyn Donnelly, from Coda. © Autumn House Press, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

My husband survived, and by all rights, life should have gone on as before, only better.  Yet every day I felt enclosed by some drear force.   I continued my daily schedule, went to water aerobics and dance classes, met with my writers’ group, worked in the garden, and visited friends.  Yet, all I did, saw, and said seemed muffled as if I were surrounded by a glass box.  My resolve to start or finish projects diminished.   My perseverance dwindled.  I received notice of events I would have taken part in only months before, but I couldn’t make myself attend.   I was my own small space vehicle slowing floating away from the mothership dock.  I have struggled this past year to take my life back.

I also realized today that I am not alone.  I know that my mother, who attends to my father now after his many strokes, must be feeling the same thing every day as she wakes in her room across the living room from my father’s, not knowing if he’s still here or not.  I realized that my acquaintances who have lost their husbands or wives must have lived with dread as they moved day by day with their partners on the one-way path from illness to death.   

I’m certain now that all of us have our turn at living with dread.   Just as life happens, so does death.  We know this intellectually, of course.  There’s another level of knowing, though, that comes from living with and through a situation, paying attention and questioning. 

I am hopeful that having a word for my experience will help me to re-dock.  I hope, too, that I can become more compassionate.

Words are powerful and illuminating.