Monthly Archives: July 2013

Silence of the Bunnies

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60 Are You My Mummy.

Once upon a time, when we were kids, a big mean tomcat adopted us and moved into our apartment.  But this is not about Harry; it is about the tiger cat Mom got for us after Harry passed away.  I named her Zephyr, but we all ended up calling her Zee.

Keep in mind this was back in the days before people knew quite everything, and were not quite so free with their harping.  Nobody lectured you about what a horrible person you were if your dog or your cat went outside (unless the dog was mean) and nobody got on message boards and expressed moral outrage because somebody dared feed their pets Purina.

Zee was a big kitten, and half wild.  She’d been fending for herself at the greenhouse around the corner where she had presumably been dumped.  She was also already pregnant.  I was holding her when her water broke.  A short couple of hours later she had given birth to three kittens, and we couldn’t keep the fleas off them.  Back then there were flea collars and flea powder and flea spray, but you couldn’t use any of it on kittens.  The vet said to wrap a flea collar in a towel and put it in the nursery nest, but she kept moving them from place to place.  The kittens didn’t live long.  We had Zee spayed right away.

(I think of those kittens whenever I frontline our animals, and I wonder if there are better ways to protect newborn critters now.)

She never quite got over it, and spent every spring for the rest of her life hunting baby rabbits from the litters born under the neighbor’s shed.  Not to kill.  To adopt.

Thing is, a wild baby rabbit doesn’t want to be adopted by a predator.  They scream.  And scream.  It’s horrible to hear, at least for humans.  We’d make her turn them loose and put them back by the shed so they could get under cover.

Zee adapted.  She started taking her adopted bunnies high into trees.

Ordinarily a rabbit maybe gets a chance to scream once, and then the predator finishes them off.  There is nothing quite like the sound of a baby rabbit screaming it’s death scream in a tree…and it goes on and on and on, because Zee isn’t trying to kill it, although she killed several that way when she either dropped them or fell during an escape attempt.

This photo is probably a tame kitty and tame bunnies.  The bunnies are probably not terrified.

But I wonder.  Because sometimes I can still hear those bunnies screaming.

thankful thursday three

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I am thankful for:

air conditioning

air conditioning

air conditioning

Great day in the morning, it’s hot out there.

grapemo and the friday five – five things I found while (attempting to) clear my desk

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I signed up for author Jeannine Garsee’s Grapemo in July project on Facebook this month.  Grapemo started as a sort of “NaNoWriMo Revisited” in February on Jen’s blog.  I swore off NaNo years ago after my second attempt, because it burns me out so badly that any headway I might make in November is erased by the fact that afterwards I’d rather have my teeth drilled than do anymore writing before…let’s say April.  Every year I am hideously, frighteningly tempted, even though I much prefer the Novel in 90 approach first introduced to me by author Elizabeth Bear; it’s more my speed and much less destructive to my peace of mind and creativity.

In Grapemo though, you set your own PWGs–Personal Writing Goals.  They don’t even have to be word- or page-counts.  Which is good, because right now I’m dealing with some kind of scary level of creative burnout, a term I thought I made up, but which a little googling has revealed, is a real thing and other people have it, have had it, and have recovered from it.

I blame mine on school.  The deadlines.  The deadlines!  The relentless deadlines!  When I get to the end of this, I told myself, I am going to get so much done!  I’m going to clean my house, ride my bike, sell my novel (godlight), write another (seldom untitled), do a couple of just-for-me graphic design projects, visit everyone I know, go places, see things, do stuff!

Class ended two months ago and I have done none of those things.  The frightening part to me is, I don’t want to do any of those things.  I only even vacuum up Cobie’s furricane because not doing so scares me.  (What if lightning strikes the house and animates that fur?!  What I have mostly done is sit around.  I haven’t even watched the shows backed up on the DVR; I just deleted a lot of them.  The old man, aka T-Moth, did most of the planting this year (admittedly there wasn’t much) and I just supervised.

So Grapemo.  The PWGs I chose were:  1.)  To write two pages a week of anything at all.  (And trust me, this blog entry is going to count!)  2.)  To read the new Donald Maass book, Writing 21st Century Fiction, which has been lying on my dresser untouched since I ordered it last winter some time.  3.)  Try some of the burnout-busters I read during my Grapemo research phase, such as writing in new locations and clearing my desk.

Which brings me to a Friday Five:  Five things I found while clearing my desk.

1.)  The receipt for Writing 21st Century Fiction
2.)  My graphic design portfolio review master list
3.)  Roughly eleventy-thousand sugar-free jelly belly cellophanes
4.)  A half-a-dozen important tidbits jotted on index cards, and
5.)  A whole mess of safety pins, paper clips, rubber bands, and things that made me wonder if “miscellanea” is a word.  It is.  So you could say I found a new-to-me word on my desk.  I think when–if–I do some more writing type stuff, I will try to work it in.

Miscellanea.  It’s a good word, I think.