Tag Archives: tail

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A tale of no tail

Yesterday on our early morning walk, Sol Duc rushed up a driveway, all fierce hunter, and attacked the pile beside a garage. Not our garage. I wondered if it was a mouse? Nope. She lost interest once she’d flushed the prey. The tailless prey was quite relieved.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tail.

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The cover of a book

“The cover of a book is only skin deep.” -Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway

My father came up with that one. It sounds like it makes sense until you think about it a bit. He and my mother did tons of wordplay and they would conflate adages. That’s “Don’t judge a book by its’ cover.” and “Beauty is only skin deep.” (I don’t agree with the second. The complex interiors of people have their own beauty. We just don’t have pageants for small intestines and hearts and brains.)

Don’t burn all your bridges, look before you leap and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We morphed those into Don’t burn your bridges before you cross them. Another I’ve heard is this:

The older we get, the more we learn
which bridges to cross, which to burn

Honestly, I am terrible at burning bridges. I think it comes from being passed around as an infant and feeling abandoned or a sense of loss and grief. I am practically incapable of really burning a bridge. At most I can put up a guardhouse with a tollbooth. Not that anyone ever tries, really. People mystify me and apparently that is not going away ever.

I love this old adage, too:

Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: adage.

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Fancy hammock

Previous.

I am Elwha, cat.

Mother got us a hammock, a two story structure. Our food can be in the lower section and I can sit above and keep an eye on it. Even when the bowl is empty. I am still hungry, but she is being a little more generous. She still feeds us in separate rooms. My sister and I race to check each other’s bowl when she opens the doors again. I like the wet food. My sister likes the dry food. Mother gives each of us some of both. We trade.

I am still doing offerings in my bowl in hopes that Mother will be more generous with the food. My sister had her head in the food bag the other day but Mother saw her and closed it up. I wish I had hands. I would open more cans.

Meanwhile I do like the fancy hammock.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fancy.

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Query tale

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is question. Those cat tail question marks come to mind. When I am having tea in the morning, Elwha guards me, facing the doors of the kitchen. There are three doors, so he has to triangulate the angle just right.

I think the question here is clear: “WHY aren’t you rubbing my belly? WHAT do you have to do that is better than that?”

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: question.

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turn about

And here are the kittens reversed, for today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt. This is very soon after I brought them home. They were exploring and always really really hungry. They grew like little weeds.

Here are both Elwha and Sol Duc, with my stealthie feet.

Elwha and Sol Duc, two kittens