Skittles and All Her Kittens

March 2006

In the spring of 2003, Isaac and I went to a little house north of Hopkinsville. A lady was giving away kittens from a litter of five. The kittens were in a big box in her living room. We wanted a female kitten so Happy, our old tom, wouldn't feel obligated to fight with it. 

There were two little females. One trembled in fear when touched, and the other reached her paw to Isaac and then bit him. Isaac decided that the little biter had personality, so we brought her home and named her Skittles. 

Skittles is spayed now, but she had two litters of kittens when she was a mere adolescent.  During one of the kitten episodes, the babies had grown too large for their box in the house. The weather was warm, so I moved them to a large wooden box on the carport. 

 I glanced into the box one afternoon, and I was shocked to see a fuzzy little alien in there. The kittens were nursing, and a baby rabbit was huddled against them. Obviously, Skittles had acquired the rabbit, and she didn't seem interested in eating it, so I left it there. I didn't know if it would survive if I released it, and I hoped that maybe it would accept Skittles as its mother. 

I looked in the box the next morning, and I was shocked to see that now there were two little rabbits. I surmise that in her condition of activated maternal hormones, Skittles decided the little wild rabbits were actually kittens who needed a home. Never mind that their ears were a bit long; obviously they needed her care.

 I still wasn't sure what to do with the rabbits. They were so young that I was afraid they'd die if I turned them loose. Still, I wondered about leaving them with Skittles. She groomed them enthusiastically, just as she did her feline children but I didn't ever see the rabbits nursing. She wouldn't have minded, but they didn't seem interested. 

After much pondering of the situation, I sought out a recipe for homemade milk-replacer for rabbits on the internet and bought some pet bottles so we could feed the little rabbits by hand. They were flighty, slippery little creatures, but they were hungry. Keely named them Abbot and Costello, and developed a method of wrapping them gently in a towel for feeding. That way, they could shrink into the towel rather than darting forward if they were startled. 

Unfortunately, Abbot died, and then we had just Costello to nurse along. I read that rabbits have fragile bones and I became concerned about the kittens hurting him. They were much larger and they played roughly. We decided to move Costello to a nest of dry grass clippings in the bottom of a large round garbage can in the house. 

Costello was terribly nervous whenever we handled him. He couldn't help it; that's the way little wild rabbits are. I think he became about as tame as a little wild rabbit can be. Sometimes as he drank his bottle, he closed his little eyes and seemed to enjoy it and maybe even dozed a little as I sat very still and held him, bundled in his little feeding towel. 

Soon Costello developed sharp teeth that could sever a pet bottle nipple with a single chomp. I started giving his milk to him in a drinking bottle designed for hamster and rat cages. It had a long metal tube with a metal marble in the end of it. Costello quickly learned to push the marble up just enough that a trickle of milk flowed out of the tube into his mouth. He grew rapidly. 

Soon our little rabbit developed a hearty appetite for clover picked from the lawn for him, and I knew that he could probably survive on his own. One sunny day, I took him out to the hedgerow along the back fence where there was a thick cover of unmowed vegetation, and I said goodby to the little guy. After I released him, he sat still for a moment and then crept away into the tall grass. I couldn't help worrying about him! 

Meanwhile, the kittens had grown too large for the wooden box, so we had moved them to a 6-foot round cattle tank that the kids had used as a pool when they were little. One day, I saw Skittles jump into the tank with a baby squirrel struggling in her mouth. Apparently she had an idea of adopting it like she had done with the rabbits. 

The little squirrel was trying so hard to escape that Skittles was excited by it. She seemed a bit uncertain -- was it a baby or was it a game animal after all? I snatched the wild little thing away from her. It leaped from my hands in a flash, ran into the shrubbery and was never seen again. Skittles was momentarily puzzled where the strange baby had gone -- and then she nursed the kittens. 

Last summer, when Costello would have been one year old, an unusually tame rabbit lived in our yard. He didn't come close to us, but he never ran away or froze in position like rabbits do when frightened. He was quite comfortable even at a 15-foot distance. The lawn mower didn't disturb him much; he just moved out of its way and enjoyed the freshly mowed greens. 

We saw him all summer long, placidly grazing on the clover in one spot or another. Of course we think it was Costello.

Isaac's Strep Dream

March 2006

Isaac was home from school yesterday because he has strep throat. Last night in his medicated and somewhat feverish condition, he had a nightmare. In his dream, he had invited his friends to a party in our yard, and a crowd was gathering. 

Meanwhile, everything inside the house was terribly wrong. Dennis was sitting at the table in his underwear drinking beer. Keely and I were dressed in the ragged old clothes that we save for painting. The house was a total wreck, nothing was ready for the party, and no one but Isaac seemed to care. 

People were showing up that I had invited without consulting Isaac, and they were people he didn't like. He didn't even know some of the people I had invited, including the goth-looking teenage couple we saw at the library yesterday afternoon (in real life.) 

Isaac was frantically trying to fix everything, but there were too many things that were very badly wrong and he knew he was going to be terribly, terribly embarrassed at any moment when his friends came inside.

 The classic nightmare with the "Darn, I forgot to wear my clothes!" moment seems almost mild compared to the kind of humiliation that the family was inflicting on Isaac in this dream.

I have wild dreams at times, but I rarely remember them long enough to tell anyone about them or even think about them. But Dennis, Keely, and Isaac dream vividly and often entertain me with the curious plots their minds create.

Wintery Night

February 2006

The rain of yesterday afternoon changed to snow when night fell. The ground was still warm enough to melt most of the flakes as they fell, so the snow didn't accumulate much. Isaac was hoping that the roads would be icy or that we'd get enough snow for school to be cancelled. But school in Christian County was "in session and on time" this morning.

Dennis went to work in the wee hours of the morning. He called me at 6:30 AM to say, "Careful!" He said that he came across some slick spots while driving to Fort Campbell.

South of Pembroke, he met a man walking toward him on the highway. He thought that was odd, but he didn't stop because he was going in the opposite direction of the walker.

Down the road a little farther, he saw blipping lights that turned out to be a volunteer fireman's pickup truck, stopped along the road. The good fireman (God bless him and all his kind!) was checking a car that had gone in the ditch.

Dennis stopped and told the fireman that he had met a man walking and that the man did not appear to be hurt. The fireman got out his cell phone to call the highway patrol, and Dennis went on to work.

All of that happened in the middle of the night while most of us were asleep. I didn't even have a bad dream, but that guy who was walking down the road probably thought he was having a nightmare.

Snowman With Hat

February, 2006

We rarely get a snow in Christian County, KY, that is just right for building snowmen. Keely and Isaac built this handsome fellow in 1994. My goodness. Isaac was only four then, and Keely was eight! Keely tells me that the snowman's hat was the ice from a cat water dish.

A Pileated Woodpecker Sighting

February 2006

Coming up the lane to our house this morning, Isaac and I saw a pileated woodpecker. He left a tree in the ditch, flew across the road in front of us, and landed on the side of a tree in Clarence's woods. He was quite a large bird. In fact, when the woodpecker took to the air, Isaac said, "What is that? A duck?"

We had a fairly good look at him. I'm certain that he was a pileated woodpecker, not a red-bellied or a red-headed woodpecker. I checked the range map for woodpeckers, and it's possible a pileated would be overwintering or even breeding in this area. It was a great thrill to see a pileated woodpecker for the first time ever!

This was the only pileated woodpecker I've ever seen anywhere!

Nursery Rhymes

February 2006

Daffy Down Dilly
Has come up to town
In a yellow petticoat
And a green gown.

Remember that one? When my children were little, I read nursery rhyme books nearly every day. This rhyme and many others gradually worked their way into my long-term memory banks.

I remember being in the tiny kitchen in one of our apartments in Germany. I was washing dishes, but Keely wanted me to read to her. She sat down on the floor with her nursery rhyme books, and I recited the rhymes to her from memory as she turned the pages.

The kids had a big library of storybooks, but the nursery rhyme books were always some of my favorites.

Be Prepared

February 2006

The Boy Scouts take a lot of ribbing about their motto, "Be Prepared," but the truth is that boys who have been through the Scouting program are better prepared than many of their peers to confront and overcome difficult circumstances.

Here is my favorite Boy Scout, my son Isaac, at his troop's Court of Honor in December. He's speaking to the group. (I didn't like all the backs of heads that were in the picture, so I edited everything out except Isaac.)

I admire Isaac's ability to pitch a tent fast, but that's only a small part of what he's learned in Scouts. He has earned merit badges (worn on his green sash) in everything from automotives to woodcarving, and just as importantly, he has had many opportunities to develop leadership skills.

We have a great Scoutmaster, a retired Special Forces Army officer, who has taught the boys all about wilderness survival and map and compass navigation. He has both exemplified and taught the Scout Law along the way. Dennis has been active in Boy Scouts with Isaac, and it has been a wholesome and meaningful activity for the two of them to share.

The Peterbang Kids

January 2006

Isaac and I were talking about the Peterbang Kids on the way home from town tonight. I don't know where my mother got their name. I don't know if the Peterbang story was a product of her imagination, or if it was something she remembered from her own childhood.

When I first learned about the Peterbang Kids, my family lived south of Johnstown, Nebraska. We had a blowout that we used as a landfill (as folks did in those days), and Mama said that the Peterbang Kids lived there.

The Peterbang Kids matched us exactly. They even had our names (except that their last name was Peterbang), and they looked exactly like us. The one big difference was that they were ornery and naughty, whereas we were sweet and nice. The Peterbangs loved to sneak into our house and do forbidden things and let us suffer the consequences!

When I was six, we moved to a ranch in southern Rock County, Nebraska. The Peterbang Kids slipped onto the very last truckload of stuff that was moved (according to Mama). And of course, they moved right into the junkpile in the blowout at the new place.

Even though I knew that the Peterbangs were imaginary, it was easy to imagine them living in the blowout. Many interesting pieces of junk had been thrown into the blowout over the years -- old cookstoves and broken chairs, rusted out pans and leaky chamber pots, bottles of all sorts, broken dishes, old magazines, snarls of wire, odd bits of broken machinery and every other thing you could imagine. There was plenty of everything that a Peterbang might need.

It was handy that they did make the move with us. When we did something naughty but not too serious, sometimes Mama laughed and said that she guessed the Peterbangs had been visiting again.

The years went by, and I became a teenager and then a grown-up, and finally, I almost forgot the Peterbangs. But when I had children, one of the Peterbangs found me again. It was the Peterbang girl who looks just like me. She was grown-up too, and she had a little girl and boy who looked exactly like my little girl and boy. Her children even had the very same names as my children (except that their last name was Peterbang, of course.)

The Peterbangs first found us in Berlin, and then they slipped onto the plane when we came to Kentucky. They settled in the gully in Clarence's pasture not far from the house. People had thrown a lot of old junk in the gully over the years, so they felt right at home.  And they certainly have caused a lot of mischief around here. Just ask my kids!

Natural Night Owls

January 2006

I like to stay up late. It's my natural time to get things done! I have to force myself to go to bed, or I'll stay up until 2 a.m. 

 I have speculated that this might be an inherited trait, from my mother's maternal line. Her Aunt Letha (Eaton) Blair was a professional night owl. For many years, she was the night operator at the telephone office in Bassett, Nebraska. I remember that my mom used to call Aunt Letha at night and chat with her if she wasn't busy. 

After Letha retired from the telephone company, she found a job being the overnight desk clerk at the Range Hotel in Bassett. She worked there for several years before retiring completely. 

I learned recently that my nephew Ben likes staying up late, also. This new bit of evidence supports my theory that there's a bit of the night owl in the family line. Keely and Isaac definitely have the trait, too.

Poison Ivy

January 2006

I have a small patch of itchy welts between two fingers of my left hand. It looks and feels a lot like poison ivy, so I washed it with Isaac's special poison ivy soap and put some calomine lotion on it. If it is poison ivy, I probably had second-hand contact through the cats or possibly the firewood.

My mom was very sensitive to poison ivy. My sister Charlotte breaks out terribly from it, and Isaac is very allergic to it also. So is Dennis. Keely has had it several times, but I don't think she is quite as sensitive as Isaac.

I wasn't allergic to poison ivy at all during my younger days but I exposed myself to it too many times, and now the allergy has developed. At one time, I could wade knee-deep in poison ivy to go fishing and not even break out. I wouldn't dream of doing that now! "Leaves of three, leave it be!"

I read once that birds will plant a friendly habitat for themselves in your yard, if you will let them. The article said to identify the area and stop mowing it. Then, put up some wires in the area for birds to perch on. In a few years, many seeds in the bird droppings will sprout and grow, and the birds will soon have all their favorite foods growing right in your yard. The article mentioned that poison ivy would probably be one of the plants that springs up.