A Figgy Story

In between watching the Olympics (such INSPIRATION!), I’m working on a new wiki (trying out my Sites wiki with Google), getting my computer off our home computer network (oh, joy!), plowing away at the home sewing (borrrring!), and attempting to keep cool in our late summer heat wave here in Bremerton (the cats are all wearing wet neck collars and sleeping by the fans).

My husband and I have also been trying to harvest a few figs.

Usually, the starlings get almost all of the figs, but this year, there have not been many starlings.  And not many ripe figs either.  My husband discovered the reason why when he went up a longer ladder, higher up into the fig tree branches.  This is a HUGE fig tree, and the leaves are very wide, and the branches are tremendously leafy.

He found two adolescent raccoons sleeping off their midnight fig feast with a daytime nap on one of the branches.

We managed to get one big bowl of figs.  They taste wonderful when they are just harvested IF they are harvested when they are really ripe, but they also don’t have a long shelf life once you pick them.  I picked out the most squishy ones to eat right away, and put those into the icebox. The rest went downstairs into the cool  basement to ripen a bit more down there.

When I went down to get the rest of the figs the next day to freeze them, Shasta, our black, male kitty was lying, proudly and possessively by the bowl.  He meyowed a “look at me and praise me” meyow, but I was too hot to fuss with him.  I took the bowl of figs upstairs, peeled them, put some lime juice over the pulp, and froze it.  I’ll make fig bread later on with it.

Then Shasta started meyowing.  Meyow, meyow, meyow!  On a hot afternoon in a hot house with no air conditioning, this was beyond irritating, and I couldn’t get him to stop. 

Meyow, meyow, meyow!  No matter what I did, meyow, meyow, meyow!  Shasta may be an all-black cat (almost), but he also is a huge part Siamese.  And Siamese (Siam is the old word for Thailand) cats have the MOST whiny, raucous, irritating meyow.

Finally, after I petted him, Shasta settled down and went outside to wait for Doug to come home from painting a house.

When Doug came home and went downstairs into his computer room, he nearly stepped on two fine, fat figs neatly laid out on his lovely, new, wood floor. 

The figs were very drippy.  They had cat teeth bite marks in them, deep cat teeth bite marks.  Shasta was very happy about this discovery, purring and rubbing and just so pleased that we had also discovered  HIS figs!

Doug decided then to look for more figs.  Just in case.  He found two more large ones, also covered with cat teeth bite marks.  Also very, very drippy.  And squishy.  Shasta pranced around, even more delighted that we were FINALLY appreciating HIS booty.

There is nothing more yucky looking than an over-ripe fig that is extra squishy.  And extra drippy.  With cat teeth bite marks on it.  On a hot, dusty afternoon. 

I was glad the rest of the figs were frozen.  I really, REALLY couldn’t face eating any more figs.  Not that day!  Maybe not for a few weeks, either!

http://www.kymmco.com/index.php?id=626

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OLD CAT WITH A NEW TRICK

Pumpkin, my old, yellow, fluffy cat, is over 80 years old in human years.  She’s had a stroke and limps with one back leg from that event.  She is partially blind in one eye from an infected scratch.  She has constant goopy eyes because of allergies.  She sneezes a lot, throws up huge hairballs frequently, and she occasionally misses the litter box with a big one.  Besides all this, she was declawed on all four paws and cannot hold onto anything very well. Oh.  I forgot the arthritis in her back, too.

However, Pumpkin is also smart and wise.  And clever.  She has figured out how to unlatch the cat door to the cat run.  We don’t know how she does this, but she manages someway to pat it just right so it unlatches. 

The other three cats, all of whom are much younger, know now that she knows how to do this, but they can’t do it themselves.  They, however, do know how to persuade her to do it!  This means that, while Pumpkin herself might not go out into the cat run at night, she can let the other cats do it and does let the other cats do it! 

We latch the cat door when it gets dark because, despite the wire walls of the cat run, we do have very large racoons and possums and rats that roam at night, and we don’t want to take any chances.  Now, we have to block the cat door shut with a large weight as well as latch it because of Pumpkin, the oldest and the most physically frail of all four of our cats. 

I don’t think we can train her not to unlatch the door because we can’t seem to catch her in the actual act of doing it; she’s always just approaching the act or just completing it.

What is true of Pumpkin can also be true of an old person who is writing for children. 

An old person can produce a new book.  Age has its advantages.  You tend to remember your childhood more clearly as you get older, the early years.  And, if you’ve been writing and reading for most of your life, your ability in these skills can greatly increase with the years. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote new books in her 60’s.  Some critics want to give her daughter, Rose, the credit for Laura’s books, but you see, Laura had been writing and reading for over fifty years.  She read good books.  And she wrote good writing long, long before she wrote her children’s books.  As old people, do, she started to remember more and more clearly what her childhood had been like.

She didn’t produce one new book for children in her old age.  She produced several in the last years of her life.  Somehow, old age seemed to unhook the latch for her creativity.

It’s why I don’t worry that much about when I sell a new book.  Unhooking the latch is what matters for me!

Here’s a rindalink to Laura:  http://www.lauraingallswilderhome.com/

SUPPORT THOSE WHO SUPPORT YOU!
http://www.booksense.com/ to locate your favorite independent bookseller!
http://www.powels.com/ for books old and new. Check out my kingdom: http://www.rindarealm.com/ and http://www.wellscribedwords.blogspot.com/.  **COPYRIGHTEDMATERIAL: DON’T PLAGIARIZE! You may not profit from my copyrighted material online. This rindawriter blog is under full international copyright, 2004-2008, by Rinda M. Byers. In addition, this blog is subject to the terms of a Creative Commons License. http://creativecommons.org
You may share FULL-LENGTH blog postings only on your blog. Be kind. Be fair. For PARTIAL QUOTES from the rindawriter blog, please get permission from me first, via the blog e-mail. Subscribe in a reader