When Nature Joins the Song ~ Cat Carols

 

Everyone knows there are “cat people” and “dog people”.  I qualify as a cat person. Mine is a beautiful calico named Dixie Rose (short for Dixie-Rose-Center-of-the-Universe-and-Queen-of-all-She-Surveys). I already was “old” when I brought her into my life as an unloved, four month old stray. Apart from a painted turtle and a small black birthday puppy who lasted only hours (tiny and overly enthusiastic, the pup terrified me and was sent packing), she’s my first pet. Like a favored first child or grandchild, I believe her to be the most beautiful and most clever creature on four paws. I don’t think she’s the most spoiled creature in the world, but we’re working on it - diligently.

The first Christmas season I shared with Dixie, it became apparent some things would have to change. The entire process of tree-trimming, gift wrapping, and holiday decorating simply was more than she could bear. A swath of shredded ribbon, broken ornaments and pulled-down swags marked her passage through the pre-holiday festivities. When the tree went over for a second time and then a third, I surrendered. My first Christmas with Dixie, we celebrated with a bare tree that had been weighted down around the base with a length of 3/8″ galvanized chain. No candles burned that year.  Presents were hidden in the closet until time for humans to unwrap them, and all sparkly things were banned because of my furry darling’s quite literal appetite for all things that glittered, whether gold or not.

Christmas came, and Christmas went, and sometimes Dixie and I disagreed strongly on the nature of true celebration. Things weren’t always good that year, and the phrase “This hurts me more than it does you” came to mind more than once.

As a matter of fact, things were so bad for a week or so I began to amuse myself by creating the first of what would become a series of little ditties I called Cat Carols. You know the tune, and can add the “Fa-la-las” as needed.

Wreck the Halls

Wreck the halls all decked with holly,
Fa-la-la-la-la, la la-la-la.
Sheer destruction is so jolly,
Fa-la…
Tip the tree with all its treasures,
Fa-la…
Shred the presents for good measure!
Fa-la…

Fast away the fur-ball passes,
Fa-la…
To wreak havoc on the masses,
Fa-la…
Swinging through the punch and cookies,
Fa-la…
You can tell she is no rookie,
Fa-la…

It was the start of something wonderfully fun. When I included the lyrics in Dixie’s Christmas card to her vet, he suggested she keep writing. So, she did. Again, you know the tune:

Stalking in a Winter Wonderland

Collars ring, are you listening?
In the lane, eyes are glistening…
The moon is so bright, we’re happy tonight,
Stalking in a winter wonderland.

Gone away are the bluebirds,
Here to stay are the new birds.
They sing their same songs as we skulk along,
Stalking in a winter wonderland.

In the meadow we can build a snow mouse,
And pretend that he is fat and brown.
He’ll say “Are you hungry?” We’ll say, “No, mouse”,
But we’ll have you for dinner on the town.

Later on, we’ll retire
For a snooze by the fire,
And dream of the prey we’ll catch the next day,
Stalking in a winter wonderland.

Of course, not everyone loves the kitty-cats, and there is a song for them, too. While I don’t advocate the shooting of cats (or dogs, or people for that matter) I certainly can understand the emotions which might lead to a Christmas song like this.

Jingle Bells, Shotgun Shells

Jingle bells, shotgun shells, there’s that danged old cat!
Get my gun, let’s have some fun, I know just where he’s at!
Jingle bells, oh, Hell’s bells, now he’s on the run!
If I find my glasses that cat’s hunting days are done.

A day or two ago, I thought I’d feed the birds,
I grabbed a bag of seed, a second and a third.
But halfway ‘cross the yard, I saw the bushes shake,
It was my neighbor’s scroungy cat, a big orange tom named Jake.

Oh, jingle bells, shotgun shells, (repeat chorus)…..

I love to feed the birds, it makes me feel so glad.
But Jake, that danged old cat, he makes me so darned mad!
He’s not content to eat a lizard or a mouse,
He wants to eat my pretty birds: that cat’s a stinking louse!

Oh, jingle bells, shotgun shells (repeat chorus)

Finally, there is this cautionary tale. A great-aunt much given to malapropism used to caution me, “Tempus fidgets“. Just like a child, cats (and probably dogs) need to be reminded that tempus does, indeed, fidget, and the magical night is not far off.

Santa Cat is Coming to Town

Oh, you’d better not hiss, you’d better not bite,
You’d better not tempt the dog to a fight;
Santa Cat is coming to town!

He’s making a list, checking it twice,
Gonna find out who chased all those mice,
Santa Cat is coming to town!

He knows when you’ve been scratching,
He knows who you’ve outfoxed,
He knows if you’ve been in a snit
And refused your litter box!

With potted cat grass and catnip-filled balls,
Snuggly warm beds and mice from the malls,
Santa Cat is coming to town.

We haven’t started this year’s song, but things are stirring, and “O, Christmas Bush” seems a likely candidate. It’s pure silliness of course, just another bit of holiday excess. On the other hand, excess isn’t always bad, and sometimes silly excess is a path to truth. Looking at Dixie, singing her little carols to her, I suddenly remember another carol. “Joy to World”, we sing, “The Lord is Come. Let Earth receive her king“.

We don’t sing, “Joy to human beings, joy to those who walk upright and drive cars and open too many credit card accounts and are nasty to their neighbors.”  The joy we sing is meant for the whole world, for stars and dirt, mountains and seas, trees, rocks, valleys and hills and every creature who inhabits them all. While we prepare our hearts, heaven and nature sing out the truth. Gifts of the season are meant for all, and we need to love our world enough to include it in our celebration.

 

In the meantime, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, whether you take the promises of the season seriously or whether you don’t, accept these bits of silliness as a gift from Dixie Rose. Feel free to laugh at them, sing them to yourself, or pass them on to friends. Believe me when I say an entire room filled with pet-lovers singing these songs can be hilarious, and they’ve been known to bring a smile to the face of even the Scroogiest animal “hater”.

As for Dixie, she continues on her best behavior. She’s learned she can avoid kitty-jail by avoiding kitty-misbehavior, and so we trim our tree in peace.  I hang ornaments that stay in place and display cookies and gifts without fear. While I prepare our celebration, she spends a good bit of time sleeping in the low afternoon sunlight, visions of catnip-plums dancing in her head as she waits in perfect peace and joy for whatever might come next.

In this season of Advent, this season of waiting and anticipation, may we all be blessed with such peace and joy!

 

Previously published in 2008, this post has been revised and re-published due to overwhelming demand (one request) and constant nagging by Dixie Rose and her agent.  I didn’t know about the agent until recently, but I should have.  Comments are welcome. To leave a comment or respond, please click below.

Godot, Meet Godette

 

Very little satisfies more completely than closing the cover on a well-told tale.  Breathing out a sigh and gazing into the middle distance while unmade beds and untended gardens begin to re-stake their necessary claims, we linger for a moment at the threshhold of our half-remembered lives, not quite willing to close the door on the vibrant, constructed world we leave behind, happy to have discovered all the pleasures of diversion, insight or beauty it had to offer. 

The adventures of Godot, my self-effacing little cactus with the phenomenal blooms, was such a story.  As I set aside his chronicle,  I was content.  The drama of his rescue, his determination against all odds to bloom and the glory of his flowering seemed to have satisfied him as much as they did me.  As his blossoms faded and fell, he didn’t fuss or complain but re-dedicated himself to growing quietly in his corner.  Life went on, as life does, and all was at peace on the porch. 

 

 At peace, that is, until one of Godot’s neighbors, a taller, columnar cactus with a shape resembling a starfruit, began to grow restless.  She’d always been a bloomer, putting out pairs or triplets of lovely, small yellow blossoms several times a year.  Like Godot, she kept her blooms for only a few hours, but she set flowers with such regularity it was easy to overlook her efforts. Most of the time, I gave her no more than a cursory glance.  If I missed one set of blossoms, another arrived soon enough.  There wasn’t much surprise with this cactus. Neither dramatic nor spectacular, she was steady and dependable.  She could be counted on to produce.

Claude Monet ~ Alive & Well in Mississippi

Highlighted by savvy museum curators and hawked within an inch of their beautiful lives by mass-market retailers and online poster-and-frame shops, the French Impressionists remain popular painters.  Once derided and criticized, their landscapes, serial studies and portraits are as pleasing to the art establishment as they are accessible to people who just want a pretty picture on their wall. It’s easy to imagine Mssrs. Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne and Manet (late to the movement, but influential in its inception) sitting around a celestial hillside, watching the play of light on the  clouds and congratulating themselves on their remarkable staying power.

Less concerned with realistic form than with natural light, atmosphere and color, the Impressionists sought to paint the world as they perceived it rather than in accordance with conceptual guidelines.  In its brief online overview of the movement, the Metropolitan Museum of Art  notes that, “Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” and not a finished painting.”

“It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions.” 

Claude Monet ~ Impression, Sunrise

Traditional landscape artists tended to depict the individual phenomena of the natural world – leaves, blossoms, blades of grass – as carefully as an illustrator and with an eye to accuracy.  Monet, on the other hand, wanted to paint what he saw ~ not separate leaves or discrete blossoms, but splashes of constantly changing color and light.  According to William Seitz, art historian and author of the Monet volume for the Masters of Art series, ”It is in this context that we must understand his desire to see the world through the eyes of a man born blind who had suddenly gained his sight: as a pattern of nameless color patches.” 

Reading his words, I can’t help but wonder if Seitz knew of Marius von Senden’s 1932 study called Space and Sight.  Quoted extensively in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, von Senden had collected stories of men and women blind since birth who regained their sight with newly available cataract surgery.  For most, it was a difficult transition, full of necessary learning.  As von Senden puts it, for the newly sighted, “Space ends with visual space…with color patches that happen to bound his view.” 

Beginning with Manet, the  idea of “color patches” was integral to the development of the impressionist vision, and it’s entirely possible that von Senden picked up the phrase from the painters themselves.  In any event, it’s easy to imagine a painter like Monet roaming the countryside with his easel and palette, painting whatever he happened upon and in the process giving us a record of the world informed by these new techniques and a unique vision. 

In his award-winning book,  The Impressionist Garden, Derek Fell notes the Impressionists’ commitment to ”capture and record the fleeting moment” through their brushstrokes.  Perhaps the development of photography and the new ability to take “snap shots” influenced their thinking.  The phrase “fleeting moment” recalls photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous commitment to his own “decisive moment”.  Whether Monet’s reflections on his art were known to Bresson I can’t say, but the lives of Monet (d.1926) and Bresson (b.1908) briefly overlapped, they experienced the same technological advances and no doubt shared some of the same artistic concerns.   

 

Monet’s Garden at Giverny

In 1883 Claude Monet moved to Giverny,  and began to develop his garden.  In the process, nothing escaped his attention.  As avid a gardener as painter, his legacy still lives in the water-lily ponds, wisteria-clad Japanese bridge and grand central allée strewn with nasturtiums.  Just as lovely is the collection of paths and beds in the walled Clos Normand, the large, traditional Normandy flower garden just outside the house. When Monet acquired the old farmhouse in 1890, he sacrified an old and tired orchard in order to plant new gardens and install the custom-designed metal hoops and pergolas that carried his  roses and clematis.  

Eventually, he turned his attention to the water garden.  He rerouted a river, selected hybrid water lilies for their color and designed his bridge all in a deliberate act of creation – he was an artist creating his own subject.  He left nothing to chance. Renoir may have built a glass-walled studio in his garden in order to paint his beloved olive trees, but Monet commissioned a studio boat, the better to paint his water lilies.

Claude Monet  ~ Le Bateau-atelier   1876

“Apart from painting and gardening, I’m not good at anything,” Monet once remarked.  Amusing self-deprecation aside, his talents in both areas resulted in the creation of the garden at Giverny. Composed as if it were a painting and over time the subject of much of his best work, it is considered by many painters and gardeners alike to be his greatest legacy – as beautiful, inspirational and pervasive in its later influence as it was for Monet himself.   

Until my recent trip to Mississippi, I hadn’t fully appreciated the significance of Monet’s double role in shaping our vision of the world. Fairly adept at recognizing his work as a painter, I’d never considered the possibility that his life as a gardener and nurturer of the very world that informed his work might someday affect my own perception of the landscape.

Imagine my surprise when I turned down a  muddy gravel road in the midst of the old Doro Plantation, halfway betweeen a clapboard house flying the Confederate flag and the fishing shacks moored along the levee, only to discover a landscape so purely impressionistic it was hard to believe it wasn’t already on canvas. Stopped in my tracks by what appeared to be rippling curtains of white wisteria hanging from the heavens, I decided to disregard the likelihood of snakes and the possibility of tetanus. Scrambling and tumbling my way across half-buried barbed wire and through piles of fallen brush into the old pecan orchard, I found my footing and looked up in astonishment.  

It wasn’t that the orchard reminded me of Monet, it was as though Monet already had been there, dappling the leaves with light, capturing the pristine translucence of new growth and then washing the world’s canvas with a sheen of new rain and unnameable colors.  I’d have been less astonished had I walked into Monet’s studio and discovered the canvases suddenly alive, or walked into his garden and surprised him painting a few new shrubs into place.

In Giverny, Monet constructed a garden for himself.  That day on the Doro Plantation, where accidents of nature and history had rerouted the Mississippi, reshaped the land and left a secret, unexpected collection of trees, flowers and grasses to shimmer in the springtime afternoon, the only thing missing was the artist himself, to record the miraculous beauty of that first impression.

Doro Plantation ~ The Pecan Orchard in Spring

 

 Doro Plantation ~ Wisteria Drifts

Doro Plantation ~ Hidden Lavender 

 

 Doro Plantation ~ Turning of the Season

Looking at the photographs today, I see them primarily as photographs, snapshots, lovely compositions in their own right and touching reminders of those unexpected bits of beauty found tucked away into the silence of a Mississippi afternoon. 

But now and then I see again the play of light, and feel the warming breeze, and catch my heart leaping up as the first impression comes back.  Breathless, I re-experience a truth as unexpected as the plantation orchard.  Once ~ just once, or at least once ~ I was granted the privilege to see the world as Claude Monet would have seen it -tumbled into  light, drenched with atmosphere, and patched with color so piercingly pure no response is possible except to be astonished by what Monet spent his lifetime revealing – that brushes, paint and canvas are sufficient to capture first impressions for a lifetime of enjoyment.

 

Doro Plantation – Daffodil Bridge

 

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Taught by a Heron’s Heart

 

In the 1950’s, Mardi Gras wasn’t big in small town Iowa.  True, the bead-throwing and balls of the French Quarter were exotic, the rumors of unthinkable behavior behind masked revelry fantastic.  But to our Midwestern sensibilities the celebrations seemed overdone, disconnected from the usual souvenirs brought back from New Orleans by lucky vacationers: long, gray-green sweeps of Spanish moss, hurricane glasses from  Pat O’Brien’s,  recordings of “Sweet Emma” Barrett’s piano and Willie Humphrey’s exquisite clarinet from Preservation Hall.  Listening to Dixieland jazz and looking at the neighbor’s photos, New Orleans’ life seemed normal enough, understandable if unusual.  On the other hand, Mardi Gras seemed odd, slightly degenerate, part of a world of drunkenness and debauchery best avoided by reasonable people.

In our town, if we wanted necklaces, we threw baseballs into a clown’s mouth at the county fair.  If  we wanted to party, kids went on hayrides, enjoyed sledding or pulled taffy.  On Friday nights adults went to the Elks Club or Masonic Lodge for dinner and dancing, and on Sunday families went to the Grange Hall for chicken and noodles.  Parades were reserved for Homecoming and the 4th of July.  When Mardi Gras rolled around there still was six feet of snow piled up alongside the streets – who wanted to watch a parade in those conditions?   

We did understand Mardi Gras marked the end of preparation for Lent, and that it was everyone’s last chance to cut loose until Easter.   On Fat Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday as we called it, our family went to the Methodist Church to eat pancakes and sausage.  We kids always clustered together in small, serious groups to talk about what we were ”giving up for Lent”.  We didn’t understand Lent any better than we understood Mardi Gras. We knew the heavy velvet curtains behind the cross in the sanctuary would change to purple, and we knew Wednesday evening television was lost to us for a few weeks because we’d be back at church, eating vegetable soup and crackers and wondering how long the worship service would last.  And, with Lent on the doorstep, we knew we had to decide in a hurry what we’d “give up” for its forty days.

Arc to Arcturus

 

At 8:37 p.m. on July 13, 1977, a lightning strike at the Buchanan South substation on New York’s Hudson River tripped two circuit breakers in Westchester County.  At Buchanan South, which converted  345,000 volts of electricity from the Indian Point nuclear plant to lower voltage, a loose locking nut, combined with a faulty upgrade cycle, meant the breaker wasn’t able to reclose and allow power to resume flowing.

A second lightning strike caused two more 345,000 volt transmission lines to fail, with only one reclosing properly.  That meant loss of power from Indian Point.  As a result, two other major transmission lines became over-loaded. When Con Edison tried to initiate fast-start generation at 8:45 p.m., no one was overseeing the station, and the remote start failed.

That’s when the lights went out in a Morningside Gardens apartment at 123rd and Broadway, along with the lights in the rest of New York City.  I just had returned from four years in Liberia, and was visiting friends for a few days before heading to California.  We’d finished dinner and were enjoying the twin pleasures of good conversation and the view from their 12th floor apartment, when New York simply disappeared.

It’s common enough for storms to start lights flickering and dimming, and not unusual for power to go out in a neighborhood even without a storm.  Transformers explode, winds bring down powerlines, squirrels play tag, and people sigh as they wonder how long it will be until they can make coffee, or turn on the computer, or watch tv in air-conditioned comfort again.

But that night in New York, in the moments between Con Ed’s failed re-start and the starting of the first arson fires in the street, we knew something was different.  Looking down from our perch, we watched traffic come to a halt as astounded drivers tried to get their bearings and control their anxiety.  Looking off toward the horizon, there was no horizon: only a black, impenetrable abyss.

The night was one of the longest of my life.  The vibrato of the sirens, the delicate horror of shattering glass, the ebb and flow of crowds around piles of merchandise looted from bodegas and coffee shops were utterly surreal, surrounded as they were by the orange glow of flames and smoke from burning cars.

Eventually, as the fires in our neighborhood began to be extinguished and the crowds seemed to be losing their enthusiasm for mayhem, we began to rest – two people sleeping as one person watched, and all of us wondering what might be next.

As the first tendrils of light began to wrap themselves around buildings and climb down into the streets, the sense of relief was palpable.  Civilization’s veneer had worn a bit thin over the night – not only because of the arson, looting and general rioting which erupted in the darkness, but also because of the darkness itself.  As we plunged inexplicably into that abyss, our candles and flashlights did nothing to allay a fear so primitive it was only the rising of the sun that brought release.

In the morning brilliance, an entire city seemed to stretch and heave a vast sigh of relief. In the street outside our apartment, someone had opened a fire hydrant just enough for a faucet’s worth of water to stream down, gentle and benign.  Suddenly filled with good humor and ready to trade stories, a city lined up at its hydrants with soap and towels, toothbrushes, wash basins and razors, and prepared to become human again.

As I think back to that amazing New York night, I remember my response with absolute clarity.  I wanted to go back to Liberia.  Looking down into the chaos-filled streets, the West African bush seemed preferable to “civilization” in any number of ways, not the least of which was the quality of its darkness.

I first experienced darkness as a blessing during childhood.   Dressed for midwestern safari, I’d clamber into the car beside my Dad, and off we’d go.  Traveling country roads, we’d roam as far from the lights of our little town as we could.  If it was summer, we’d pull out a blanket and lie on the ground, amazed at the bright river of stars streaming across the sky.  If it was cold and snowy, we’d wrap the blankets around us for extra warmth, drink hot chocolate and admire Orion, my favorite winter constellation. 

I learned the constellations first - Orion,  the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Scorpio.   Later, I began to learn stars -Antares, Aldebaran, Polaris, Betelgeuse, Sirius – and little verses that helped find them in the sky.  “Arc to Arcturus, spike to Spica”, the verse went, and arc to Arcturus I did, gazing over and again into mysteries that seemed close enough to touch.

Eventually, I began to grow up.  Trips to the country with Dad weren’t as much fun, and adventure became measured in lumens.  We hadn’t heard of light pollution, and we were seekers of light, real or metaphorical.  The bright lights of Broadway, the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, even Paris, the City of Light, drew us out of our darkness toward their flames like a great, fluttering cloud of moths.  If we sometimes had to settle for the lesser lights of Des Moines, Paducah or Evansville, no matter.  Our lives began to arc in new directions, and Arcturus was forgotten.

Forgotten that, is until years in the African bush and a newly-acquired taste for offshore sailing pulled me back into the darkness, amazing me with the realization that “star” light is real.  Even without a moon in the sky, starlit paths cross land and sea; night creatures scurry ahead of nearly invisible shadows and ribbons of spume stream across the waves, hardly distinguishable from milky rivers in the sky and lit by the flickering of uncounted distant stars. 

There is darkness that is an absence – an absence of the neon, incandescent and fluorescent lights that mark the presence of humans and their activity.  When that darkness comes, as it did in the New York City blackout, it can be unnerving and awkward, occasionally frightening and quite capable of releasing all the darkness in the human soul. 

But there is another darkness which is all presence: velvets folds of night sprinkled with tiny bits of light and time that testify to our presence within a reality far older than human life.  Wrapped in that darkness, secure and at home as child with parent, our souls begin to arc to Arcturus and beyond, toward the galaxies beyond our heavens and into a more compassionate understanding of our own place in the universe.  Arcturus is already there, waiting at our vision’s edge.  We need only lift our eyes.

 

Edvard Munch ~ Summer Night on the Beach

 

 I live near the sea. On these summer nights
Arcturus is already there, steadfast
in the southwest. Standing at the edge of the grass,

I am beginning to connect them as once they were connected,
the fixity of stars and unruly salt water -
by sailors with an avarice for landfall.

From where I stand the sea is just a rumor.
The stars are put out by our street lamp. Light
and water are well separated. And yet

the surviving of the sea-captain in his granddaughter
is increasingly apparent. (more than life was lost
when he drowned in the Bay of Biscay. I never saw him.)

As I turn to go in, the hills grow indistinct as his memory.
The coast is near and darkening. The stars are clearer,
but shadows of the grass and house are lapping at my feet

when I see the briar rose, no longer blooming,
but rigged in the twilight as sails used to be -
lacy and stiff together, a frigate of ivory.
                 

~ Eavan Boland  

 

                                                                             

© Text copyright Linda Leinen 2008

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