Where has my discipline gone? I can’t seem to find it
anywhere and it’s making things harder than they need to be.
I have a long list of things to do this weekend. They’re not
the want to dos to which I was looking forward. These are the must dos, the
commandments.
Dust bunnies rest on the top of the grandfather clock in the
hall, the one below the stairs from which I thought I’d got all of them last
weekend. Either I missed some and they’ve replicated as only bunnies can do, or
they’re new. In either case, they’re back with a vengeance. I need to vacuum
all of the high surfaces, to see if I can catch the parents of these bunnies.
Festoons of cobwebs drape across the downstairs hall and in
corners at the tops of walls all through the house. Those are due to the time of year – summer and
spiders.
Our house is a haven for spiders. I think they’ve talked
amongst themselves, “that house over there, you see it? Yeah, that’s the one.
She doesn’t kill spiders, unless you’re a black widow. If you’re not a black
widow, she’ll catch you and put you outside. I’ve been in and out of there four
times already.”
I like spiders. I don’t necessarily like looking at them,
although some are pretty cool if you get past the creepy factor. Some are
actually aesthetically pleasing (I had to do that because I had already used ‘pretty’
and didn’t want to be redundant), if you take a minute to examine them. You don’t
have to get close, just close enough so you can see what they’re doing and what
they look like – no hands-on required.
A couple of years ago we had a big garden spider hanging
between two bushes that frame one of our downstairs windows. Banded greenish
yellow and black, with black tips on his legs, he lived there for several weeks.
Every morning I would get up and peek out. Nyx, the goddess
of the night had passed by, leaving her tears behind. The web that stretched
across four feet of front garden was heavy with them, shining diamonds that sparkled
in the morning sun. The strands of filament were deformed by their weight and,
in the middle, sat Fred. Just hanging around, gathering the warming rays from
the sun, and waiting for breakfast.
All spiders in my house are called Fred. I don’t know why. They
just are. Part of it is because having one name for all of them makes
identification unnecessary. If it’s a spider, it’s Fred. I don’t have to look
too closely to determine if it is really Fred or just a Fred lookalike. Unless
it’s a black widow. Those are easy to identify, named or not. Then it’s dead
and the name doesn’t matter.
I also have to wash my walls. Sam (our cat) had a period of
several months where he had terrible sneezing fits involving bloody noses
(think spray). As a result, we have cat-height ‘decoration’ along some of our
walls and across the formerly un-patterned carpet.
Of course we took him to the vet who did a partial exam and
said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s a tumor and there’s nothing we can do. He’s only got a
few months.’
Between March and August, not much changed except the size,
duration and velocity of the sneezing. We have cat height blood splatter in sufficient quantity that a forensic technician
would drool.
Since containing and controlling wasn’t realistic, and no
one was willing to just put him down, we let it happen. Walls can be repainted,
the carpet was already a disaster (living with an ill elderly person brings its
own challenges) so we chose not to worry. Eventually I took to putting him inside
the shower stall when he started. At least that was easy to clean up when he
was done. But the walls and carpets were already lost causes.
Still, he continued to eat and do all the normal cat things and,
except for the sneezing, wasn’t showing any signs of being seriously ill. In
September we took him back to the vet.
She put him out and stuck a tube up his nose
so she could look at his sinuses. Happily it wasn’t a tumor but she also didn’t
see anything that was causing it.
He had his last fit in March and even though he still
sometimes sneezes, it’s not prolonged and doesn’t involve blood. Personally, I’ve
concluded that he had something up there – a bit of food or something else that
was irritating his sinuses. He used to shake his head a lot for days before,
and then wham sneeze-fest. The head shaking is gone as are the bloody
noses so I get to try to clean up the walls. He's still here and doing fine at eighteen+.
It’s time for an oil change. I have things to do in the
garden. There’s the grocery shopping and other outside errands.
A long list of
stuff and my discipline to get them done has deserted me just when I need it
most. May I borrow yours? Please? I’ll return it, mildly used.
Best~
Philippa
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