Roses. And Singing.
I would be very grateful if the dranglefabbing weather gods would (a) STOP SENDING US HARD FRELLING FROSTS and (b) stop ONLY giving us good gardening weather on days I’m rushing around doing other things. Like today. Yesterday was a damp grey unfriendly day that felt colder than it was—but I was out there in the afternoon anyway, planting, ahem, roses*, and looking around nervously for places to put the friends of the one, single, solitary climber I ordered yesterday. There was an evil little wind and just enough rain falling at unpredictable intervals to make you wet if you were out in it** but nothing like enough to do the landscape any good.***
Roses are, at least, hardy†. But we’ve had below freezing temperatures the last two nights—and I had started planting gladiolas. Which are not hardy. But they’re all (I think) up against house walls so they should be okay. Arrrrgh. I’ve got dahlias and begonias and chocolate cosmos all lined up waiting eagerly to go outside. The ones already in pots I am now schlepping back indoors again at night—and meanwhile Hannah is coming this weekend which means the Winter Table has to come down†† whether I’m ready to lose it or not, because we want to be able to get the dropped leaf on the proper kitchen table up so that two of us can sit at it at the same time.††† Tea in the sitting-room is fine. Breakfast, not so much.
Today was a glorious day. It was still cold when I got up so I pottered‡ around drinking tea before I ferried the chocolate cosmos, the dahlias, the begonias, the kalanchoes‡‡ and the geraniums back outdoors again. Then hellhounds and I had a magnificent hurtle . . . and then there was the usual mad Monday scramble of trying to get some work done and some lunch eaten and some warm-up singing accomplished before my voice lesson. . . . I planted one pansy in the brief gap between taking hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to pick them up for their weekly adventure and leaving for my rendezvous with Nadia.
I went in there still brooding about how to think about the performance issue, because while from my perspective an awful lot of where music comes from is where writing comes from, stories don’t need to be performed. The book goes into the reader’s hands and the reader reads it. Yaay. Simple. Music has to be performed, and this usually involves human input in some particular. I’m a professional writer, and I think the genre/literature, grown-up/kiddie face-off is bogus, so I don’t worry much about what rung of the great ladder of immortality I’m on.‡‡‡ But to me there’s this vast chasm between what for want of better terms we’ll call amateur and professional—not that there aren’t great amateurs and calamitous professionals—and I am nowhere on the great ladder of musical immortality. Why shouldn’t I not be able to face performing my pathetic little attempts at singing right after Oisin’s been playing an organ sonata that feels like something I should have been listening to and being evolved into a higher form of life by for the last fifty years? That’s my music, that sonata. Mine. My singing, however, is the dandelion at the foot of the giant sequoia. The lopsided dandelion.
Nadia gets this patient expression on her face when I go in with stuff like this.§ And the thing that’s really embarrassing is that she instantly dropped me in the teacher place. She knows that I’ve taught creative writing a bit—not a lot; little enough that I can forget when it suits me—and never more than a short seminar. I doubt that I’d be anyone’s Nadia§§ over the long term. But I do know a few things about being a teacher: that you cut your student slack for being there and wanting to learn stuff.§§§ That you’re glad to see them there wanting to learn stuff. That you give them huge credit for trying. That you look for the good stuff, so you can say, here, this is good, work from here, expand here,# think about what you were doing here, try to find that space again. You don’t say, you are crap, you don’t know it all yet and you are therefore a lesser mortal, you don’t say, you aren’t good enough. She said, how would you feel, if you were a teacher, and one of your students came in one day and had a cup of tea and a chat and as she was leaving mentioned that she’d brought a story—but she wasn’t going to let you see it? Would you be cross?##
Oh. Yeah.
Nadia said, You know, Robin, it’s not lack of talent that’s holding you back at the moment. It’s lack of confidence.
Sigh.
I sang . . . not too badly. I’m kind of getting somewhere with the emotional expressiveness thing. Kind of. And even I can tell that the quality of the noise I’m making has improved.### That positive feedback loop that Nadia talks about is definitely there, and getting stronger, which means that practise at home is less frustrating and more fun.
But . . . well. . . .
* * *
* I seem to have a few left over from last year. Ah. Hmm. The old I’ll-put-you-here-and-deal-with-you-later flimflam referred to yesterday. I had a lot more excuse for not getting around to and/or forgetting things when I had two acres and hundreds of roses. Now my only resort is blaming Menopause Brain. This year my negligence included the discovery of three roses heeled in in Peter’s garden. Oops.
** And to annoy hellhounds, if they were out in it with you
*** And, speaking of the things that the gods could do IF THEY’D STOP PLAYING POKER AND ATTEND TO BUSINESS: please let those odd little scritchy, flappy noises not be even-earlier-this-year-returning thirsty bats seeking redress from drought. Atlas is coming tomorrow to look for any holes he might have missed last year.^ And I’d maybe better fire up the extra-large plant saucers I had dotted about the place for any livestock that wants a drink. More sodblasted things to WATER.
^ And yes, I have ordered the mosquito netting to drape over my bed. Just in case. Except that it isn’t mosquito netting. It’s the stuff you put over your strawberries to keep the birds off. I don’t think the bats will care. It’s the right size, the right mesh, the right price, and it’s sold by a genuine gardening site. Mosquito netting doesn’t seem to bring out the better class of vendor, although I admit I’m a bit fascinated by the sheik-of-Araby romantic fantasy approach.
† Even if I agree with Diane in MN that my eyes got a little wide at what Antique Rose Emporium was offering as ‘extra hardy’. I’m at the wrong house but I’ll have a stroll through my rose book shelves some day soon. If I didn’t divest myself of them when we moved out of the old house^ I have at least two about rose-gardening in major-bloody-winter areas.
^ Yes I even got rid of some ROSE books
†† That which stands over the hellhound crate during the winter, with a green plastic garden sheet over it, to give me somewhere to put the indoor jungle. When winter gets serious, Atlas and I haul most of it up to the green/summerhouse/shed-with-a-grow-light at Third House. But winter never really got serious this year, until about a month ago, so there’s been a lot of bringing-stuff-indoors-at-night, taking-it-out-again-next-morning, and swearing,^ the last few weeks.
^ Gently. So as not to damage my throat.
††† I do keep telling you the living space at the cottage is small.
‡ I should be doing housework. Fortunately Hannah is not easily shocked. And she’s known me for over thirty years.^
^ Bats may be a bridge too far. But we don’t have bats.+
+ Yet.
‡‡ http://houseplants.about.com/od/succulentsandcacti/p/Kalanchoe.htm I didn’t discover these till a year or two ago. But they’re wildly tender.
‡‡‡ This is aside from Never Writing the Story as Well as the Story Deserves, but I’m not getting into that tonight or none of us will get any sleep.
§ Have I mentioned (recently) that Nadia isn’t thirty yet? Gods. I’m being mentored by a child.
§§ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Boulanger
§§§ I am very very very bad at students who are wasting my time because they don’t want to learn stuff.
# Not necessarily literally. Contrary to popular McKinley belief, some short stories should stay short.
## Might it even hurt your feelings?
### I’m not ready for the Travelling Tiddybumps Opera Troupe^ tryouts yet however.
^ Home made brownies at intermission. It’s why anyone comes. Not for the singing.
Roses
Milk Wine
I work at the Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio, and Madame Alfred is one of my absolutely favorite roses. (: If people are looking for a fragrant climber, I always lead them to her, as long as they have the room. I put her on my parents’ front fence, and she blooms a treat.
The Antique Rose Emporium! Squeeeeee!
https://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/
The very last year I was in Maine, I . . . planted stuff. In a clearly prescient sort of way. Gardening had never really occurred to me, except as something that other people did.* I’ve said this (often) before: gardening in Maine, while other people certainly did do it, looked way too much like hard work. Gardening in Maine is the Xena Warrior Princess end, with evil gods and zombie unicorns and person-swallowing landscape and so on and I’m much more the Gabrielle before she started going to the gym end. If there are any zombie unicorns around I am definitely looking for somewhere to hide.
But I had a silly fit, and, that last summer, went around digging holes and putting things in them. Including three roses. Which actually, you know, grew, and produced flowers—I mean, roses, yipe. I have no idea where this might ultimately have led: my little lilac-enshrouded house was heavily shaded by not only the two ginormous lilac hedges but several boulders as tall as the house in the back, and a huge, gorgeous old maple tree in the front. I never was going to have a lot of opportunity to grow roses there—which is just as well, because the joke is that roses are annuals in Maine, and I’m pretty sure my three didn’t survive their first winter. But I might have learnt about the roses that will survive serious winter, and how to help them do it.
Instead I fell in love with an Englishman and moved to England and his two-acre garden where he spent hours every day eeeeeeeeep.** And after I got my breath back I started putting roses in left, right and centre, and learning the hard way about growing the beggars. To do this rigorously*** involved ordering catalogues—this was before the web began infiltrating us hoi polloi: I didn’t have a computer yet† let alone an internet connection—from every rose seller I could get the address of. This included several in the States. I don’t remember if The Antique Rose Emporium’s was one of the ones I had to draft in an enabling American friend to lay my hands on—quite reasonably a lot of plant sellers won’t send catalogues overseas when they won’t ship their plants overseas—but the whole ‘rose rustlers’ thing was very attractive††, and little old country cemeteries in England sometimes have drifts of ancient roses with great gnarly stems as big around as trees.
The Antique Rose Emporium is pretty much the only American rose nursery I pay attention to any more. If I want an American perspective on a rose, I look it up there first. And if I didn’t already have Mme Alfred, on the say-so of Emporium personnel, I’d be looking her up for details of her English performance record.
I originally bought her, back at the old house, by accident. Well, I was very young in terms of rose-growing, and Peter was no help, him and his frelling herbaceous borders.††† I think I’d actually ordered something else, and this thing arrived with a label saying ‘Mme Alfred Carriere’ and I thought, oh, fie, and heeled her in in a blank-ish spot, because I didn’t know what to do with her and I had a lot of other roses to plant, and I’d look her up and figure out what to do with her later. Only I never quite got around to it. And she rioted, as she will do, and took over a large swatch of that end of what had been the vegetable garden before my first rose-beds went in. I probably somewhere have photos of her pouncing over the trellis that several more modest climbers were dutifully scaling from the other side, and engaging Dortmund in mortal combat. Dortmund was another of my errors—I made a lot of errors—a single, cherry-red rose, white at the base of the petals, and not at all my sort of thing, except that I loved her. As I loved Mme Alfred. And her big double creamy flowers looked fabulous tumbling among Dortmund’s dazzling single red.
I totally had to have Mme Alfred even in my handkerchief-sized garden at the cottage.††† I put her in my first year there and her tallest stems started reaching above my neighbour’s two-storey-plus-attic roof a couple of years ago—and since I’m looking out my first-floor‡‡ office window, this is not a trick of perspective.‡‡‡ When she’s in flower I get gusts of her perfume through my office window. Yes. She’s one of the best.
Oh . . . and guess what I was doing today? Ordering roses. Remember I said I needed another climber? Just one climber . . . ?
* * *
* When I shared a house on Staten Island for a while, one of my housemates was a zealous, not to say fanatical, gardener. That back yard makes my tiny garden at the cottage look large in comparison but by golly it was INTENSIVELY PLANTED. It was impressive but somewhat intimidating—you could barely squeeze out the back door without being attacked by a radish.^ I felt I wouldn’t have the authority to boss so much plant life around and I was sure it knew it. I felt no impulse to try for myself.^^ And mostly I used the front door.
^ Or a banana-sized slug. Ewwww.
^^ Being assaulted by the occasional house plant was enough. I’ve had house plants catapulting off window sills most of my life.
** Speaking of zealous.
*** Is there another way? says the woman who is now waiting for her book on Japanese particles to arrive.
† shock horror
†† Even if the Emporium’s ‘our story’ about Mermaid as a rose that will withstand ‘droughts and blue northerns’ and thrive in the wilderness makes me feel like I’m living on another planet. I lose Mermaid. Repeatedly. She’s one of the crankiest madams ever to grace these mostly verdant shores. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: she has a bit of a rep around here. And then there are her thorns: which are long, curved and prehensile, the better to make you bleed. She’s very beautiful though. So we all keep frelling buying her when she conks out on us again.
††† The English cottage garden style has roses. Peter did have roses. He just didn’t have enough.
‡ I don’t have Dortmund now: she’s one of these great stiff angular things, about eight foot square.^ I do keep thinking about putting her in at Third House, but Third House’s garden is still small, it’s just bigger than the cottage’s.
^ She also has almost no scent. And you have to draw some lines somewhere. Sigh.
‡‡ Second floor in American English
‡‡‡ Although as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s surprising how many rather too large roses you can wedge into a rather too small garden if you’re stubborn enough. And don’t mind the sight of your own blood too much.
Christmas
Yes, I worked on SHADOWS today.* Next question**.
The front door of the mews since last night after dark.
Wreath. Tactful, Peter-placating***, reusable wreath.†
Tree. You will note Large Box to the right.
I admit I didn’t manage to hang every ornament we own on it, but it’s definitely decorated. The important baubles are up. The robins. The horses. The roses. The bells. Some time between yesterday and New Year’s I’ll probably finish getting the tinsel over the lampshades, picture frames, candlesticks, and piano.
Another view of Large.
Yes. It’s Large. Peter said, You wouldn’t buy me a microwave. I said, No, I wouldn’t, and it doesn’t weigh enough, unless they’re now making plastic microwaves in which case I’m not going to buy you one twice.
::LOUD RUSTLING AND RIPPING NOISES::
Highlights:
Gasp!
Yes. It’s true. I bought Peter a Kindle. Now all we have to do is figure out how to use it. Georgiana and Saxon will be here tomorrow: I’m proposing they do it. Hey, I bought it. My job is over.†† But the point is that you can dial up the typeface size, and even with his reading specs Peter finds tiny mass market paperback type size trying.
Oooh! Roses!
Peter bought me a book on roses. How . . . surprising. Okay, so I’ve been eyeing it on line for months. But the gorgeous slipcover is a surprise—as is the fact it’s signed and numbered.
Yes, it's still a thrill when other people sign their books.
I had assumed it was just another drop-dead-glam coffee table book full of glossy pictures but it’s a lot more, well, beautiful than that, and a pleasure to handle as an object and never mind its subject matter.††† It’s smaller and fatter than a coffee table book—like a book you would, ahem, read—and the edges are gilt!—and the pages are matte not shiny, and it’s paintings not photos. You even have a sewn-in bookmark.
La France. Usual historical suspect for first Hybrid Tea. Blah blah blah.
I grew her at the old house. She was a frail heroine, prone to fits of the vapours, and a terrible head-hanger.
The GUARDIAN is always full of helpful suggestions this time of year, and look at what I found only a few days ago on offer at http://www.tattydevine.com/ :
Hee hee hee hee hee hee
I immediately turned to Peter and said, don’t you really want to buy me a Perspex bat necklace? What? he said.
Oh and the large parcel/small coffin/medium-sized old-fashioned maiden aunt?
It's a bin.
No, really, this is a great present. We have terrible bin luck at the mews. This kitchen is where most of the heavy cooking happens, and you want a serious bin with a lid, and you want something that it doesn’t take both hands to open. We’ve had a series of expensive foot-pedal-lid-opening bins which are the joy of our hearts for about six months and then they break. But they’re so expensive you don’t just rush out and replace them. Well, the last (broken) one is over a year old and . . . I saw this in a catalogue (yes, I have some strange tastes in catalogues) and it had all these rave customer reviews and . . . ask me in six months.
. . . And now I seem to be extremely full of turkey and champagne and Christmas pudding and brandy butter and . . . I forget . . . zzzzzzzz . . . .
Hope yours was merry.
* * *
* Not, perhaps, for very long. But on four and a half hours of sleep I’m doing very well. Bells were rung, hellhounds were hurtled, SHADOWS was gently drawn a little closer to being finished . . . oh yes, and it’s Christmas.
For the first time in my life I have a Christmas cactus blooming on Christmas. By garden centre error and mismanagement. On one of those raids last autumn, when I went for a £2.99 replacement spool of green gardening twine and came home with so many plants I could hardly wedge them all in Wolfgang, I bought another Christmas cactus. I need more Christmas cacti like I need . . . uh . . . more rosebushes. At least the roses live outdoors. But this one was a particularly pretty pink with white edges. It was just starting to come out. So I bought it and brought it home.
And all its flower buds immediately fell off. ARRRRRRGH.
Christmas cacti are generally extremely tough so I assumed that it would be fine next year but that this year was going to be a bust. Nope. About a month ago I noticed it was producing little pale tippy knobs . . . a fresh lot of flower buds. Yaaaay. I’m not even going to complain that it’s reverted to the standard pale pink of which I have lots. I have lots because fallen-off or pruned-back branches root really easily.
Stop press! A Christmas cactus blooming on CHRISTMAS!
** And yes, I’ve been singing. But I haven’t touched Dove Sei in three days. I’m singing Christmas carols.
*** ‘I don’t need a wreath.’
† With my eccentric bent for befriending inanimate objects, I find this is another advantage of things like fake, that is, reusable, wreaths and trees. So every year it’s like, hey, how are you, how’s it going?, good to see you again.
†† I told the archangels when they were last here that I’d bought Peter a Kindle for Christmas and it was so sleek and shiny that if he didn’t like it I’d take it over. Raphael and Gabriel exchanged a long look. Robin, said Raphael after a minute, do you really want another piece of technology in your life?
No. And besides, Astarte has Montezuma too.
††† Well, okay. Do mind the subject matter.
Doodle update
Fiona was here today, so the first wodge of auction stuff has finally been shipped out. Everything takes longer than it’s supposed to. The wodge that was posted today was much smaller than it should have been, for a variety of reasons, chief among them that I’m trying to write a novel in five months, and two of them are already over. The irony is that one of the reasons the auction finally went live so late is because I was preoccupied with the final throes of this summer’s PEG II crisis—and then I hurled myself into SHADOWS, needing to believe this was a story and I could write it—and now of course I’m slowly doodling my way through all your lovely bell-supportive orders—while continuing with this madness of trying to finish* SHADOWS by the end of January.** I was telling Fiona that most days I keep thinking I can maybe extrude one more paragraph, one more sentence, and then I will certainly do a stint of doodling . . . and what happens is that I hammer away on story-in-progress to the point of collapse, pirouette through about three doodles, and fall off my chair.***
Roses for ROSE DAUGHTER. Not all the book + doodles are so . . . um . . . um . . . snork.
Also there was a terrible accident with a cup of hot tea about ten days ago which I will leave to your imaginations because it was far too emotionally scarring for me to describe it in all its graphic horror here. Then Darkness frightened me half to death† with the projectile geysering, and as a result this week my general energy level has resembled an underachieving pancake or a badger-gnawed doormat.
But EVERYTHING takes longer than it’s supposed to. I wanted to get the first load of books off today, but the auction is finally forcing me to do something I should have done years ago, which is hire a frelling mail box for a return street address that isn’t where I live and that has business-hours staff who will sign for parcels that require a signature.†† The nearest mail-box-hire is in Zigguraton, which is not ideal, but it could be a lot worse. I examined the web site carefully, and nowhere does it say that they need a blood sample, a retina scan and £400,053.27 collateral. So I sent Fiona in to do it for me, while I kept doodling. Which, when she got back again, is how I found out about the extra requirements. ARRRGH.
Fox. With tail. Tails are IMPORTANT.
Fortunately my bank’s local branch office is a full-service agency so I obtained a blood sample and a retina scan from the clerk, and then I wrote ‘£400,053.27’ on a piece of paper and he stamped it††† with the bank’s seal of authorised fiscal reality‡, and I sent Fiona off again. About half an hour later I received the critical text on Pooka: SUCCESS!
Sleeping dragon. You don't want to be downwind.
Meanwhile, however, the day was mostly over. Fiona has printed off the rest of Blogmom’s batched orders and organised as many of them as I’m likely to get through in the next fortnight, when she comes back again for a Special Auction Put-Through Day, which will include an awful lot of book-packaging, and I will keep doodling. I want to emphasise here that I enjoy the doodling‡‡—including the excuse to doodle—what is turning my eyeballs red and my hair white is the time. I don’t like making all of you wait, although I am making you wait, and the complicated stuff—the doodle-icious books, the knitting, the musical composition—is at the bottom of the pile. I’m sorry. But I am a disorganised scatterbrained‡‡‡ dipstick at best, and I do need to keep eating. . . .
But look at what Fiona brought me:
Hermione the hellbat
Why do I doubt the original pattern called for PINK?
* * *
* Well, ‘finish.’ No way in any of the eleven hells^ am I going to finish finish. But I’m hoping to have it to the final-frantic-yanking phase by the end of January.
^ According to Damarian cosmology
** If I’d been in any shape to think, I should have slammed the auction into action (Blogmom did keep asking me when I was going to provide her with x or y so she could get on with building the thing) as early as possible. But although blaming myself for being a purblind git is one of my favourite leisure-time activities, it’s hard to get around the fact that when you’re in the middle of a book crisis, one of the symptoms of its being a crisis is that you can’t think.
*** I should never attempt to pirouette.
† No, three-quarters
†† Curses! snarl the carrier companies. We’ll have to think of something else!
††† Sucking on his sore finger
‡ Which is at least as reliable as anything else in the in the global financial market these days
‡‡ Although I reserve the right to laugh hysterically at some of the special requests. More about these in future blog posts.
‡‡‡ —brain?
A Keeping My Head Down Day
Today has been mostly head down over the writing desk (or the writing kitchen table, as it may be), looking up occasionally long enough to regret a good gardening afternoon . . . the things I do to get paid.*
Atlas has been hacking back Mme Alfred Carriere who was showing signs of pulling down my semi-detached neighbour’s house wall, and while Phineas is an exceptionally easy-going fellow, I think even he might protest being involuntarily catapulted into my back garden. I wouldn’t like it either: the garden’s small enough already, I don’t want the contents of two bedrooms, a study, a kitchen and a bathroom scattered around** although loose bricks are popular as plant-pot stands. Since I don’t do heights, Atlas is the one who’s been out there with the ladder and the loppers. It’s astonishing how much more light there suddenly is: Mme Alfred is kind of a monster. But the best kind of monster: the kind that produces lots of big fat roses. She needs her autumn feed, as does everything else in this garden and Third House’s. Meanwhile I’ve got the autumn bulb orders arriving any day now—yeep. With less of Mme Alfred shadowing that side I can get more tulips in.
Autumn has kind of snuck up on me*** partly due to the coldest August in seventeen years†† . . . I am not ready for it to be autumn.† I used to like autumn better than I do now; that first crackle of cold meant adventure; it used to feel like the time of year I woke up after the sultry hedonism of summer. But I’m not very interested in adventures any more—or rather the adventures I am interested in are things like learning to ring Cambridge minor or having a high A available during choir practise, and not only erratically after midnight and a glass of champagne on a good day. Back in the days when autumn meant adventure I didn’t have increasing numbers of tender begonias, geraniums, dahlias, cosmos, fuchsias, blah, blerg, blug to try and frelling overwinter. Have I told you I keep thinking about buying a second, extra-small grow-lamp and hanging it over the Winter Table that goes over the hellhound crate at the cottage—? The summer/greenhouse at Third House is starting to get kind of crowded.
* * *
* Yes, in many ways very like what most people do to get paid. I keep telling you writing is not glamorous. It has its brilliant moments, but glamorous?^ No. And I splattered salad dressing on my white shirt today (again).^^ Frelling springy frelling lettuce frelling leaves.
^ A friend was telling me about the book convention she’s just back from and I was thinking yes, I remember why, when I moved over here, I wasn’t particularly sorry to be too expensive to import to most American book cons any more. It’s the same thing in a different medium as book mail: most of the people who want to talk to you about your books are really nice, or at least complimentary, even if both of you are so desperately embarrassed and uncomfortable by the encounter you each run away afterward to hide under the bed. But it’s the skirmishes and confrontations—including the occasional downright scary one—I remember.+
The main drawback, for someone like me, lacking in most public social skills++, is that I have totally lost what habituation I once had+++, and when my poor publisher starts talking about promotion and that of course they’ll pay my travel expenses I’m like, What? Are you kidding? I only so much as cross the Hampshire border with a written permission from Queen Mab. She’s not noted for her good temper either, and I don’t want to press her too far. An extra thimble of Laphroiag is acceptable as a thank-you for allowing me to go to London for the day: I don’t want to imagine what she’d demand for a trip to New York.
+ And the frelling patronising ones. The whole ‘oh, when are you going to write a real book?’ brigade, and its outliers, like the hug from the perfect stranger who says, BEAUTY was such a sweet little story. I want to believe there’s a lot less of that around these days when YA is hot, but thirty years ago . . . especially with this face which thirty years ago looked about sixteen. I looked like someone who might have written a sweet little story. This involuntary circumstance was not good for the development of my attitude toward my public. I’ve told you all this before, haven’t I? Sorry. The unexpected shaping experiences of one’s life are, I find, harder to integrate and forget. —Grrrr. There’s one stranger-hugging woman I could probably still pick out of a police line up . . . but that scrimmage was also when I was still in the early, first-book, I’m a Published Author! phase, and hadn’t started biting people yet~. She probably went away thinking she’d brightened my sweet little life.
~ Yes, Jodi, I’m looking at you. But I don’t think you’re the natural viper that I am.
++ And for anyone who has met me at a con and thought I came off fairly human: thank you. Clearly you made it easy for me.
+++ And gained a sweet little case of ME . . . and more lately, a sweet little couple of majorly flaky hellhounds.
^^ Yes, I should wear a bib or an overall or something. Except that I hate it. It makes me feel like a drooling idiot.+ Of course I’m not thrilled with using spot remover several times a week either. These critical dilemmas of life.
+ If the shoe/bib fits . . .
** Not to mention the potential for highly distressing contact between the ex-hellkitten and the hellhounds.
I think I tweeted about the hellhounds attempting to chase the statue of a cat. I entirely agree it’s a very lifelike statue of a cat but I thought dogs had a highly developed sense of smell?? And yes, I know, sighthounds, but they pick up scent-trails like foxhounds and cruise along with their sterns in the air and their noses to the ground. Maybe there’s a switch buried deep in their medulla oblongatas^ that auto-sets for whichever stimulus comes in first, eyes or nose, and then turns the other one off. But hellhounds have taken this daunting rebuff to the way things are supposed to be—cats are cats, and they run away—very much to heart. Chaos checks that statue now every time we hurtle by—he has grasped that there is something wrong with this cat: it doesn’t run away and, upon closer investigation, it smells funny—but he’s still sure he’s missing something. Darkness keeps an eye on Chaos keeping an eye on the non-cat.
Today we met a cat—a live, breathing, tail-twitching cat—of very much the same colouring and demeanour as the non-cat . . . and the hellhounds didn’t know what to do. Ears and tails went up, and butts sank halfway to the ground in that ready-for-anything posture and . . . nothing happened. I’d already put the brakes on the leads in case anything did happen. But the cat just went on lying there, curling the end of its tail up and down, and the hellhounds went on looking at it, waiting for it to prove that it was not a non-cat . . . and eventually we pottered on, befuddled hellhounds following on a loose lead.
^ Or equivalent. My knowledge of the architecture of the canine brain is nil. +
+ Yes I know I could google it. Tomorrow. If I remember.
*** Not that everything to do with the passage of time isn’t, in my experience, essentially sneaky.
† Ho hum. Like I don’t say this about every season, month, year, week, hour, blog post, bolting hellhound. . . .
†† Which is fine with me. And reminds me that when I first moved over here we used to have English weather, which is to say cold and wet, including in August. Ah, nostalgia.