MindSpinner

The process by which we find our way through life intrigues me. Life seems a river that, guided by gravities of heart and need, flows around unyielding obstacles and digs its channels in remaining possibilities, winding at various distances from might-have-beens.

Today, while I write, the marmalade kitten (AKA Orange Stripey Dude) bats and leaps at a strand of leftover yarn tied to the doorknob. No, Orange Stripey Dude didn’t go to the animal shelter. Something came up on the afternoon of July 3, and we didn’t make it to the shelter. On July 4, the shelter was closed. This was fateful. Anybody who can resist the charms of Orange Stripey Dude after 48 hours can be suspected of having a flinty heart. His gender has now been confirmed, he’s been proclaimed healthy, and he’s had his first shots. Like the rest of the fur folk, he is a reliable companion - you feed him, you pet him, and he opts to stick around. He isn’t much good at intelligent conversation, no more than Cat the First or the dogs or the bunnies, so thank heaven for NPR and audiobooks, blogs and the Internet. He does have an appalling amount of playful energy, hence homemade cat toys such as leftover yarn strung from doorknobs. (The leftover yarn means I finished crocheting the string bag as of Sunday, which is a good thing, because work started Monday, and I won’t have time anymore to waste on crocheting unneedful things just because I find the task soothing.)

Outside, vegetables grow in the kitchen garden and in eight raised beds. I’m making plans to expand the effort further and to include more herbs. I’ve even ordered seed for a stand of amaranth. In the past year, besides the vegetables, I’ve added three apple trees, a pecan tree, currants and gooseberries, and I’ve investigated permaculture. Someday, when the teenagers are making their way in the world, food from the backyard will replace much of the food from grocery store. I’ve taken a rather involved look at the matter of how food gets to the grocery store to the table this past year and decided that I don’t want to be at the mercy of all possible threats to food security and affordability.

So, I have too many animals and a yard that’s going to look like a microfarm. All this seems random, but it isn’t. It’s all factored into a knowledge that’s sunk into my bones, “I am on my own.” This is different from saying “I have no friends” or “I have no social life,” for I have these in modest measure. I have too many animals partly because they keep me company. My yard will turn into a microfarm partly because that’s one form of security I can manage while my income erodes against the cost of living. And because being outside planting or weeding does me good when nothing else can. (Alas, mowing affords nothing of the same benefits, though it needs doing this very day. If I have to have a lawn, I should have sheep to nibble it. I wouldn’t have to crank a sheep and push it tediously back and forth on a hot day.)

In my bedroom, beneath the gable, an arched window admits stars, sometimes the moon, white clouds dry-brushed on blue sky, inky washes of storm clouds, and the blended pastels of morning. Blinds obscure my view of the neighbors’ house below during the day and the neighbors’ view of me slipping out of clothes at bedtime, but the half circle at the top of the window remains uncovered to frame an arc of sky, a succinct heaven. I’ve long rejected the notion of concocting window treatments, the window being the point.

Beneath the top of that arch, a tiny spider wove unseen a month or two ago a radiating web not larger than the spread of my small hand. It has gathered dust now until it is a proper cobweb. One or two of its delicate threads have been torn by tiny wings, but it is still near perfect. The artist in me has overruled the fussy Victorian housekeeper who would swat the web down with a broom lest visitors glance up to see it. I feel too much affinity for the spider and the web to sweep the work away.

I think in webs that span void, circumference and even contradiction. It seems to me that there is nothing that is not connected to something else and even to its own opposite. There is no strength that is not connected to weakness, no virtue that is not connected to flaw, no ending that is not connected to beginning, no beginning that is not connected to an end, no gain that is not connected to loss, no gift given that is not also received in the giving, no selfish choice that does not incur loss as well as gain. Reality and consequence and perception are always webs, as interconnected as the forces that generate the trajectory of the ripple that rides the wave there and back again, in a foam of physics calculations the nimblest mind cannot follow. The web also represents connections felt across spans of distance, forged in conversation yet not absent in silence or difference or even death, rope bridges spanning roaring chasms between souls, precarious, yet sturdy enough for white-knuckled crossings.

The spider web at the apex of the arched window that greets morning, midday, and night, is mute. It only reverberates a little with currents of air and clings to the anchors that suspend it two inches from that plane where the world within meets the world without. I look to it daily from my chosen spot on the side of the bed nearest to the light and nearest to the dark.

So ends my apologetic for lapses in dusting .

I have three hideously beaten up, wheeled Rubbermaid trash cans, bought five years ago and brutalized weekly by the trash pick-up folks until not one of them is without broken places. Since the perfected technique of emptying is to tear the lids off and toss these aside, whether in yard or street, the lids won’t stay on now either. Their tabs are broken.

The trash cans are so disreputable looking that I’ve been on a campaign to procure a big rolling cart from the trash pickup company for two years. At first I requested a cart politely. A year later, I requested one again. (Trash cans do not merit my continuous attention.) This year, I finally got one. I explained that I wouldn’t be paying another bill until I had one and would be changing service providers if one were not forthcoming. It arrived week before last - large, heavy, indestructible, and an eye-popping royal blue. I question whether one needs one’s eyes popped by a trash can, but Big Blue Whale is here to stay.

That leaves the Three Uglies. It has become apparent the trash people have no inclination to accept the Three Uglies as trash. The Three Uglies are not biodegradable, nor would they make attractive planters. At the moment of this writing, the Three Uglies and Big Blue Whale crouch together in a sizable huddle by the garage. I’m debating as to whether Big Blue Whale makes the Three Uglies look even uglier or whether the Three Uglies make Big Blue Whale look even bluer, or whether both these things can true at once. (I’m leaning toward the last conclusion.)

My quest for soul’s inner peace as relates to trash cans requires that I find not only a suitable place for the Three Uglies, but also a suitable use. I think I can fit them between the blackberries and the dogs’ fence where they will be out of view. If I drill holes for drainage in the bottoms of them, I do believe they will make passable compost bins. No need, now, to order those wire bins from Gardener’s Supply.

As for Big Blue Whale, soul’s inner peace is harder to achieve. One needs to study the thing as Michelangelo studied a piece of marble to find the sculpture waiting within to be freed. Is that grill on the front meant to be baleen? Should eyes be painted on the lid rather near the hinges? And what about the placement of the dorsal fin?

Or maybe Big Blue Whale should just move into the garage with the bicycles and the gardening tools before whimsy gets me into trouble with the neighbors.

Last night I found myself at a Meijer’s store across the river, about an hour from home. I had some time on my hands, about four hours of it. I had ducked into the store to buy some fine-point pens and to use the restroom. I had no idea where the office supply section was, so I wandered the store for a little while and found myself in the sewing aisle. I looked wistfully at the sewing machines - mine has ceased working after many years’ use - but saw nothing to covet. I know the machine I actually do covet: it’s a professional mechanical Singer sewing machine with metal parts instead of plastic, no fancy electronics, just a sturdy basic machine. It’s not that I plan to do any sewing this summer. If I had money for fabric, I’d make slipcovers for the living room couch and love seat, but that project will have to wait.

Still, I was itching to make something, and when a pretty ball of cotton yarn caught my eye, I wanted the simple repetitiveness of crocheting. I haven’t crocheted anything since I was in college. I don’t know how to knit at all, though I suspect I will try to learn sometime. And I wanted the pretty balls of yarn. I settled on a project depicted on the label - a string bag. Instructions were promised on the reverse side of the label. I don’t need a string bag, to be honest about the matter, and I did not need four little balls of yarn and a needle. But sometimes it is good to make a thing, to do it instead of buy it, partly for the satisfaction in the doing, partly for the ritual, and partly just to remember how such things are done. Everything comes to us so easily in this culture. We hold out a piece of plastic and the thing we want is ours. We acquire things thoughtlessly, own things thoughtlessly, and dispose of them thoughtlessly. We are impoverished because we are no longer connected to the making.

Everything we own has a story. Everything we eat has a story. Sometimes the stories are stories we don’t want to hear, like the story of how the pallid egg came to rest on the breakfast plate, or how handiwork acquired at a desirable price represents hardship. Sometimes the stories are uninspiring, like the story of the plastic mixing bowl on the shelf at Wal-Mart or Target. I find myself less oblivious to the stories of things than I used to be. I feel the need to make a cotton string bag and use it for a very long time, until it falls apart. On impulse, I buy a small handmade bowl from a potter to mix my bread dough in, not a plastic bowl from a big box store. I plant a seed to grow food for the table. I want less, but the things I have - their nature and their origin and their impact - matter more.

So today, needle in and needle out, pattern ignored (who needs all that tiny cryptic print anyway), a string bag grows row by row, all purple, teal, lavender, and maroon, in the quiet of the empty house on a Saturday evening, while the cat sleeps nearby at the foot of the bed.

Two small lionhead bunnies joined our household this year in the usual way, and the usual way is this: Offspring desire a new pet and are indulged because I have a weak spot for both offspring and pets. Offspring lose interest in new pet, for the most part, after a month or two or three, but I fall head over heels for pet, and so pet stays. In the matter of the bunnies, just multiply by two, and you have the story.

Pet, however, is the wrong word, for it implies a lesser position and human ownership besides. If you watch who waits on whom around here, you would logically conclude that the fur folk collectively own me, carefully train me and negotiate procedures only under duress, if then. (No amount of duress, for example, has convinced the cat that the couch is not a scratching post and the dogs that the Christmas tree doesn’t need christening.)

The white bunny, one Thomasin, is a case in point. He’s the bunny you’d most like to hold; if he doesn’t like holding, he doesn’t let on.

The hunger strike began gradually. First he snubbed the rabbit pellets I bought at Kroger when the bag from the pet store ran out. I had to drive 60 miles roundtrip to buy more of the pet store brand to which he was accustomed. I bought four bags, along with the sweet-smelling timothy hay rabbits are supposed to have, too.

Thomasin’s companion is a charcoal-colored bunny named Shawntycleer. (Yes, I know how to spell Chaunticleer, but Dark-Haired Daughter did not.) Shawntycleer, when turned upside down, looks rather like a boy to us, but we’re really not sure. Thomasin emphatically disagrees and acts on his opinions; that’s where he gets his nickname, Rapist Rabbit. In any case, to spare Shawnty a life of incessant and generally unwelcome sex, we house Thomasin and Shawnty in two different cages when they are inside and two different pens when they are outside. The life of companionship we had envisioned for them amounts to their sitting next to each other on occasion and touching noses between bars. (Dating relationships between parents of teenagers can work a lot like this.)

Shawntycleer is to be distinguished from Thomasin not only by means of a stark contrast in color, but also in his/her comfort level at being carried or held. Cooperation can suddenly melt into a bid for freedom - a frantic roiling of fur, ears, and claws like blackberry thorns. Because she (or he) is so easily spooked, when I pick Shawnty up, I’m always crooning that song,”a spooky little girl like you.” Shawnty is probably eventually doomed to give up a literary if misspelled name in favor of becoming “Spooky” instead.

But at least Shawnty/Spooky can be depended upon to clean up that little bowl of rabbit pellets, morning and night. Thomasin, on the other hand, began eating fewer and fewer of his pet store rabbit pellets, day in and day out, until he was eating, earlier this week, none at all. Nothing in. Nothing out. He wiggled his nose, turned it up, and vowed a hunger strike to the death. Death can happen in fairly short order with rabbits, in such cases, as I understand it. There’s supposed to be stuff going in regularly and stuff coming out regularly, and any interruption of the process of turning elongated cylindrical pellets into little round pellets is to be viewed as a medical emergency.

So I began to ply him with a diet of treats. He’s always liked a tiny carrot or two. He ate those. He likes apple slices, it turns out. Indeed, he likes wheat berries and lentils, too, and is simply beside himself for red lettuce leaves and baby spinach. In fact, when I come to feed him next, he has eaten everything. It’s delicacies in, pellets out.

All he wants, you know, is real bunny food - gourmet salads morning and night. He smirks at me as if to say that, if I’d let him out in the garden, he could procure his own gourmet salads and save me the trouble, but he patiently suffers the fact that I am a prisoner of my fears - neighborhood dogs, hawks, owls, coyotes, garden destruction and the lure of freedom that might make him suddenly hard to catch.

All in all, he considers his hunger strike and my consequent retraining a complete success. To pass the time, he amuses himself with the ironic fact that adult human beings take classes, read books, and conduct experiments in order to learn more about behavioral modification theory and practice whereas the subject is so easily mastered by furry little bunnies and six-week-old infants.