Country Life

Meet Miss Mini

/ Apple Hill Cottage / 8 Comments

Yes, this is a cat post.

Filled with adorable pics and anecdotes that only a cat lover will appreciate. Just a warning so all others can stop reading now…

When King Henry the First died in November, we had no intention of getting another cat anytime soon. Not only were we grieving his sudden dying, we had  planned a Scotland vacation for ten days in June. All our cats had chosen us by just appearing and staying and loving. We were sure our next cat would do the same.

But 2020 disrupted life as we know it. Maybe for a long time to come, who knows? So mid-April, mid-pandemic, we made an appointment to visit the local humane society. We had viewed the cats online first (Who would have thought we would Ever. Do. This.) and I had liked the little one-year-old grey tabby named Teacup. When we phoned, they told us she was reserved for another family. But please come and look at the others.

We weren’t allowed in, but we sat on the back deck and they brought us out cats one at a time. We looked at all ages and all colors, and it turned out Teacup had not been taken after all. She was a teeny, tiny kitty who had been in a home of thirteen cats. No, they assured us, she hadn’t been abused; thirteen cats had just turned out to be too many. (!) We laugh about her ravenous hunger now, blaming it on her being the tiniest of thirteen and never being able to push her way in to get any food. She will eat anything from pizza to grilled salmon to tortilla chips that have fallen on the floor. She will clean out any bowl, no matter its contents. At dinner time, she sits and begs food like a dog. When the refrigerator door opens, she is there. I’m sure that someday she will step right inside…

How can we resist this?

The vet said we could give her as much food as she wanted for the first few months, and she has gone from a 5-pound mini-kitty to an 8-pound smallish cat with a bit of a tummy roll. Teacup seemed to us a stupid name for a kitten. I’ve since read that it is really a thing–tiny cats are called Teacups– but it certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue. It only took a day to decide to call her Mini. She comes running when we call her. Especially when  you say, Mini, Mini, Mini… and you have the treat jar in your hand.

Our other cats came to us as 3-year old male adults with plenty of experience. They were loving lap cats who didn’t play much. Mini plays with everything. Miss Mini was born to move stuff around: she knocks pens, combs, rubber bands, earrings, hair ties off tables to get them on the floor so she can play one of her favorite games–hockey. We find leaves brought up from the basement in every room, pieces of paper moved from tables to the floor. She skitters around the house like a small tornado leaving the rugs in the bathroom in disarray and attacking feet as if they were stink bugs. She runs between legs with abandon and camps out in front of the refrigerator door or the cupboard where she knows her kibble is kept.

Both our other cats were worldly strays–tomcats who loved the outside. At the Humane Society they tried to make us to promise we wouldn’t let Teacup outside. She’s timid, they said. She won’t like it and it will put her in danger. We didn’t exactly promise, but we said we would be careful with her. Mini desperately wants outside. She sits at every door and tries to escape when the door is opened. But each time she manages to escape, she suddenly realizes she hates it outside. After the first disaster, we realized that just shaking the treat jar gets her back inside where she belongs. But lately the falling leaves have been driving her crazy. She wants every single one that she sees flutter by the door. Mr. H.C. actually let her out the other day so she could chase a flying leaf. She brought it inside and batted around the floor until it fell apart.

This is a favorite box and when she crouches down in it, she cannot be found…

And yes, she is a snoop. She loves to sneak into Mr. H.C.’s workshop–it’s a dead giveaway–her whiskers are covered in cobwebs or sawdust… Mini has never met a cupboard or closet she didn’t love. She used to bury down at the bottom of the bed underneath the sheets. We have broken her of that habit, but we often have to wander around calling her because 1. She might have snuck outside when the door opened, or 2. She has a ton of hiding places where she could be catnapping illegally. Mini still has one bad habit. When she thinks it is time for Mr. H.C. to get up, she jumps on the bed, attacks his hair, and then zooms out of the room as if he won’t know who did it. This is repeated until he gets up and feeds her. She does not do this to me. (She must know it wouldn’t work…)

Mini on her favorite chair.

Our male cats were the strong, silent type. Not Mini. She talks all the time. She meows when it’s time to get up, she meows when it is time to eat, she purrs while eating, she mews to remind us that she needs a dessert treat, she yowls to remind us that she Really REALLY wants to go outside. She greets us when we come home, she answers when we ask her questions. We carry on regular conversations all day and she usually has to have the last word. Yesterday morning she sat in the living room caterwauling for reasons known only to her. She runs for the joy of running; I think she talks for the joy of talking.

When a cat lives in a house that is still being renovated, she either has to take to the basement when the air compressor starts up (that’s what Henry did) or just be brave and become a construction cat. Mini, the skittish little kitty is fearless and nosy about all construction messes–she loves it when nails fall on the floor. She jumps on the desk, knocks off rolls of tape, and chases them all over the room. Yesterday I found her carrying a pair of tweezers around the house. Today she stole a fuzzy new mini roller cover and carried it around as if it was her own little kitten. (It was a fuzzy white little thing, after all.) And like all cats, she loves the fact that the furniture in the room gets moved around daily. And of course, after work, there’s always time for the nap.

Proof she loves her leaves…and the porch.

On this last most beautiful day of Autumn, I relented and let her run out on to the porch when I went out to give the herbs one last watering. She was good for awhile, chasing the leaves and soaking up the sun. But then her curiosity got the best of her, and she just stepped right over the porch rails onto the 3″ ledge that runs all the way around the porch. She just sidesteps on the ledge, and soon, there she is on the steps that lead to freedom.

She is our little pandemic kitty, and she does her job well: She makes us laugh.

Fire on the Next Hill

/ Apple Hill Cottage / 16 Comments

last night
a fiery orange light
glowed ferociously
on the next hill.
i thought the Blakers’
barn was burning.
(i left my warm bed and stepped outside for a better view.)

the flames
leaped into the black
and devoured the trees
of the horizon.
i thought the still-green leaves
in the valley between
will keep us safe.
(my husband joined me to witness the spectacle.)

then the triangle
of flames and fire
suddenly settled into
a sideways orange half moon.
61.2% rising ENE
at 11:16 p.m
i thought when has a half-moon-rising
ever been fire in the sky.
(we laughed at one more
2020 wildness.)

my skittish, sheepish
thoughts morphed like moonfire
into a silent prayer.
Lord of the moon, the sky, the earth,
protect us from fires raging
in the darkness
and turn them into
just a spectacular autumn moonrising
in the night sky.
(i slept the weighted, dreamless sleep of peace.)

Retrieved from the trash bin

/ Apple Hill Cottage / 8 Comments

We were fifty minutes into the hour-long Outlander episode “The Deep Heart’s Core” when the DVD player stopped. Didn’t even give us any warning of weird blips or slow motion stoppages–just died. Just as Roger is about to escape from the Indians who are dragging him to New York far away from Brianna. Not only did it stop playing, but the disc wouldn’t eject. Visions of having to pay for a Netflix disc made us disgruntled, as well as the DVD stopping just at the exciting part. It might take us a week to find out what happened to Roger.

Mr. H.C. is handy with pliers and screwdrivers, so he took the thing apart and we physically took the disc out of the player. We retired to the bedroom and watched the last ten minutes on the laptop. Roger escaped.

Now, I can hear you saying, why do you even rent discs from Netflix anyway? Can’t you just stream like the rest of the world?

Well, thanks for asking, but no. We can’t, actually. Because we live in rural Pennsylvania, where there are hills and hollers, and the nearest 5G network is 50 miles north in Pittsburgh. We have three options for internet service: Windstream, whose fastest rate in our neck of the woods is 1 mbps (yes, 1); Dish networks, which everyone knows are worthless when it is cloudy (and let me just say, we have cloudy here); and a hotspot. Which is what we have. It’s serviceable. It works. Sort of. Most of the time. It’s expensive. We don’t have unlimited data. But I digress. This is not a post about our crappy internet service.

The next morning Mr. H.C. took a look inside the player and (unbeknownst to me) tossed it in the garbage.

Let me tell you, this is something that NEVER happens. Mr. H.C. keeps everything so he can fix it someday.

By the next afternoon we had surveyed our options and they were: 1. Buy a cheap one on Amazon for $45; or 2. buy the one they had left at Walmart for $150.  (I would just like to interject here, that when we lived in Pittsburgh, we had a very modern set up with streaming and a decent-sized multi-screen that functioned both as a TV and a media screen, and if we ever got discs we played them through the computer. It all worked smoothly.) DVD players seem so 90s. So I spent some time online the next morning to see if anyone could tell us how to fix it. The best I could come up with was a YouTube video on cleaning your DVD player.

“Maybe it just needs to be cleaned?” I asked him.

“Well, it’s in the garbage, so it really needs to be cleaned now,” he said, as he rooted through the trash and dug it out brushing off some crusted oatmeal. (No, that’s a lie. There was no oatmeal on the DVD player because we are a zero-food-trash- composting family.)

Genius husband then cleaned the DVD player and tried an old disc we didn’t care about, and then ended up watching the whole thing. DVD player is as good as new, which is a great thing, because now we don’t have to spend our Lockdown money on a 90s DVD player. It’s also a great thing, because now we can avoid the news and watch the last few episodes of Outlander. Unfortunately, we’re a season behind, because we live on a country road (almost heaven, but not quite) where there is no streaming (in heaven the light will be all the streaming we need). Oh, I mentioned no streaming already.

The moral of this story is Never throw anything away because you might have to retrieve it from the trash bin. Yes, our recycling place is closed too.

The real moral of the story is Don’t live in rural Pencilbania. Where there’s no recycling and no decent internet. And the yard signs are all for the wrong guy. (I’m debating about whether to put a Biden sign in the front yard, but I don’t want to start a sign war…)

The real, real moral of the story is Can our country be retrieved from the trash bin, cleaned, and fixed so it works once again?