Tag Archives: Sol Duc

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I must demur

“I am Elwha, cat.”

I love my brother, but I must demur with him. He worries so.

It is true that we nearly starved as kittens. Our first mother disappeared and we cried and cried. We were picked up and brought to a strange cage place, with many many animals. It smells of fear and grief. Some of the cats are older and displaced. They have lost their families and are very sad.

Still, there was food! My brother is worse off than me, and often shoulders me aside when the food comes. I slap him with my claws if he is difficult and I get enough to eat. They give us more food than we can finish.

People handle us and pet us daily. At first I don’t like it but then I do. Elwha has a louder purr than me but I don’t care. The people must earn it.

Two women come one day and handle me and Elwha. They leave. Two days later we go to a very strange place and sleep. I wake groggy and kick my brother. The women are back and we are put in a smaller cage. This worries me but I am so groggy that I cannot fight. We are shaken for a while and then she lets us out.

In what turns out to be home and she is Mother now.

I am helping Elwha with his installations in the bowl. It is silly. We are not going to be starved. In fact, Elwha was getting portly and now he is a finer figure of a tom. Mother feeds us in separate rooms. I don’t put offerings in MY bowl, but I am willing to help him. We both enjoy the tissue paper, especially when it is red. It’s a bit of a waste to get it wet, but it makes him happy. I enjoyed shredding the last piece on the stairs, like a scene of death and destruction. I would dearly love to do the same to the birds, but Mother takes us out with harness only. I still like to go out.

I am Sol Duc.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: demur.

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Small cat

The kittens were new in 2021 and are so much bigger now. Elwha is the biggest cat I’ve ever had. Tiger face and shoulders. They were a bit malnourished when I got them and Elwha grow out rather than up at first. He was also very worried about food and ate very fast. It took a while for him to trust that more food would come. So far so good and he is much more mellow now.

And they both love to go outside on harness and leash. I have to take them one at a time, because I can’t effectively carry both if one of them freaks out. Elwha is much more likely to freak out than Sol Duc. The recycling truck is particularly scary. Also people, dogs and SUVs.

Early on, when everything was new, Elwha jumped into the bathtub and howled, because he landed in water. He had previously found it empty. I had to rescue him and he was very upset. He spent a full thirty minutes cleaning himself.

Very happy New Year’s Eve. Be careful out there and I hope the New Year brings joys. I am hoping that this will be our last really bad Covid-19 winter, though we may need to do yearly vaccines.

Here is a tea-cat, Hot Kitty, in a teapot that Helen Burling Ottaway made. She was my mother and the poem on the teapot is mine. You can read it here. We drank a lot of tea growing up.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: new.

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Living together

Lichen are a lifeform formed from algae and fungi, which is amazing. Apparently they join forces when they can’t survive on their own and form a different creature. And it’s not just one kind of algae or one kind of fungi, but lots of them! I am reading Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures, by Merlin Sheldrake. It’s really quite amazing. I love science, it opens up the world!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: lichen.