Crow’s Feet by guest-poster, MYRLN.

“I Gotta Crow,” Peter Pan says (not meaning he’d captured one).

Counting Crows was a rock group.

A crowbar doesn’t have wings.

Eating crow, figuratively, is no fun, and literally would likely be awful

Yet on the whole, crows are a pretty interesting species, despite their predilection for standing in the middle of the road and eating the innards of recent roadkill. And despite the name for a collection of them: a “murder” of crows.

Watching them steadily, however, can give you a genuine respect for their intelligence and behavior. For example, throw a slice of bread out in the yard for them on a regular basis and at the approximately same time, and in short order, the crows will learn the behavior and arrive within a half-hour to collect the bounty. And they don’t sit there and peck at it either. They pick up the whole slice, even an end crust, and fly off with it. All this only after one has seen the bread and called one or two other crows to come over and keep protective watch while he goes down to gather it. They like an occasional dog biscuit, too, as ascertained when one flew by carrying the bone-shaped treat and looking thusly much like a tuxedoed crow wearing a bow-tie.

They are, of course, marauders, too, as everyone knows. They search out nests of other birds and try to make a meal of eggs or fledglings. The nest birds will naturally counter-attack and drive off the invading crow. And the crow will fly off, chased and pecked at by the nesters, while making no effort to resist or fight back. (A fact also true of hawks being chased by smaller birds, including crows.) There’s just too much available to bother fighting for it.

The other fascinating aspect of crows is their group behavior. While families keep pretty much apart from each other, staying in their own defined territory, there are times when that separation is dumped. A couple times a year, there’s a migration, and in that instance, hundreds and hundreds of crows fly off together in a great black sea aloft, wave after wave of them. No “vee formation” as with geese, just a wide and long sheet with occasional breaks between the sheets (no pun intended).

The other group action comes when a crow’s nest (a real one, not a ship’s lookout post) is targeted by a hawk. A cry goes up from the endangered nest. A member of a nearby family comes to investigate, sees the situation and goes back his nest to report, and a call goes up down the line of families until soon there a dozens of crows showing up to drive off the invading hawk (who merely flies off in search of another meal elsewhere). Then all return to their own family nests to resume whatever they were doing before called to defend a neighbor.

As for crow’s feet, they look okay on a crow but not around your eyes.

Our language makes use of many crow analogies.

Here’s a poem, thanks to Jim Culleny of No Utopia, that tugs at the edges of my nostalgia for my ballroom dance days.

Fox Trot Fridays
Rita Dove

Thank the stars there’s a day
each week to tuck in
the grief, lift your pearls, and
stride brush stride
quick-quick with
heel-ball-toe. Smooth
as Nat King Cole’s
slow satin smile
easy as taking
one day at a time:
one man and
one woman,
rib to rib,
with no heartbreak in sight–
just the sweep of Paradise
and the space of a song
to count all the wonders in it.

For the past several weeks, I’ve had to take down the bird feeders as soon as it gets dark because the raccoons have taken to dining here each night. Not only do they dig out the rocks that were holding the bird feeder pole in place in its hole; one night when I was running late, I caught one climbing up the pole and swatting at the feeders, trying to knock them down.
Every night I took the feeders in. Every night the raccoons would dig out the rocks looking for stray seeds. Every morning I would straighten the pole and hang the feeders. And every night……
Last night I forgot to take down the feeders. This morning, not only was the pole down on the ground, but one feeder was totally destroyed and the other was missing. The darn varmints must have decided that they felt like “take out”.
So, today he cemented the pole into the ground. One problem solved.
But how do we keep the raccoons from climbing up the pole once we replace the feeders? They manage to climb right over the baffle that keeps the squirrels out.
Barbed wire wrapped around the pole, I suggest. He doesn’t want to hurt the ballsy critters. I figure that they’ll get pricked once and they won’t try it again.
I haven’t found anything online that guarantees to keep raccoons out or away from anything.
At least, for now, I’m reprieved from my Sisyphean task.
I still think barbed wire is the answer.

I can’t believe it! He mowed down my lush stand of foxglove that was growing (well, they were mostly alreay spent) along the back of the house. I know that it’s his house, and he told me two years ago that he doesn’t want stuff planted alongside the house. But at least he could have warned me and given me a chance to move the plants. I had a huge and healthy melissa officinalis that I brought here from my last garden. Gone. Mowed down. I had some plants that I wanted to dig up and take to my daughter for her garden. Gone. Mowed down.
If he had warned me that he was going to mow, I would have told him that I was waiting for a day with less than 80% humidity to go out there and move a lot of the plants. The rest he could have mowed down.
I suppose they’ll come back next year.
Buit maybe I won’t.

Yesterday, I cut and filed her fingernails and soaked her feet so that I could cut her toenails. It’s true, you know, that both finger and toenails get thicker and harder as you get older. There really is nothing physical that gets better with age.
I’m looking at her left foot — big bunion, hammertoe, mangled other toe. Funny, but her right foot is not that bad. I think, like me, her left foot is wider than her right. Unlike me, she always bought shoes to fit the narrower foot instead of the other way around.
My mother once had racks of expensive pumps — pointed toes, high heels. I remember, back in the 50s, when I just couldn’t wait to wear a pair of shoes with heels, I would try on my mother’s pumps. Eventually, we wore the same size, at least in length, and that was when I realized that the only way pumps would not slip off the heels of my feet was if they were tight across the toes. Apparently, the same held true for my mother, but that didn’t stop her from buying those Ferragamos.
So now I spend hours online trying to find her shoes that do not hurt her left foot. I think I found a pair that might work, and I’m ordering two pair in two different widths. We just might have to buy both pair, the wide for her right foot and the double wide for her left foot.
I wonder if there’s anyone out there who has the opposite problem, ’cause we will have a right shoe that’s size 8.5 double wide and a left shoe that’s 8.5 wide.

Now I can add to the heretofore mentioned list of varmints eating their way through my plantings Japanese Beetles and little reddish brown moths. Both are so plentiful around here that you bump into them just walking down the driveway to get the mail. They careen into your legs, land on your head. You unknowingly bring them into the house and then have to chase after then with the dollar-store flyswatter. Yuck. Yuck. And more yuck!!

No Ordinary Ordinance
by MYRLN (guest poster)

In Utah, a 70-year old woman was handcuffed and tossed in the slammer.

Why?

‘Cause she wouldn’t tell a cop her name.

What?

Yeah, honest. This cop was trying to write her a ticket but she wouldn’t give her name and then she decided to go back into her house.

And…?

And the cop must’ve figured she was trying to escape, so he grabbed her and cuffed her. Then she tripped on her steps and fell, scraping her nose and elbows. And the cop took her to the slammer.

You’re kidding!

Nope, and there she languished for more than an hour before police higher-ups heard of the arrest and had her released. (No, her name wasn’t Hilton.) And the arresting cop was put on administrative leave.

Huh? Wait, wait…what was he ticketing her for in the first place? Speeding? DUI? No license?

Well…no. It seems the woman had violated the town’s “nuisance” ordinance.

Ah…playing the t.v. too loud! Or too many animals?

Uh…no. It’s an ordinance against neglected yards. The woman had refused for a year to water her lawn.
HUH? And they…?

Yeah…they did.

But it’s HER lawn!

Yeah…there’s a town without a lot on its collective mind, huh? Much like the rest of the country which insists pukey, manicured grass you have to water often is superior to nature’s own hardy, self-tending menu of wildflowers, dandelions, weeds, berries, new trees. Nope…we can’t have that stuff. That’s…well, natural. The last thing this country wants to be. ‘Cause in our twisted logic, natural’s not…well, natural. It leads to violating the nuisance ordinance.

Back in the days when I was only responsible for myself and had a job that paid well enough, I was able to indulge my attraction to mysticism.

Mystics hold that there is a deeper, more fundamental state of existence hidden beneath the appearances of day–to–day living (which may become, to the mystic, superficial or epiphenomenal). For the authentic mystic, unity is both the internal and external focus as one seeks the truth about oneself, one’s relationship to others and Reality (both the world at large and the unseen realm).

What a luxury that seems to me now, when day-to-day living is all that I have the energy to accomplish.
I think of this now because for many of those past years, I often joined a close friend of mine at workshops, seminars etc. that were based in the processes of the mystic, particularly as they attract creativity and artistic inspiration. Married and childless, she has gone on to teach some of these processes on the college level. Without responsibilities to any dependent, she can continue to explore the ideas and philosophies and spiritualities that well-known modern mystics such as Matthew Fox and Jean Houston continue to publicize. I think of this now because I had lunch several weeks ago with her and her husband as they passed through town.
I am at times envious of the luxury of time that she has – the luxury of being able to place a priority on her psychological and spiritual development, of not being the one grounding factor in a dependent person’s life, of having time to contemplate…..
I wonder, when I am done with the physical and emotional requirements of caregiving — after I have done with confronting, every day and night, the struggles of human life on its most elemental level, if I will again have that hunger for the expanding horizons that mysticism has to offer.
When I think of my life after this difficult piece of it, I think of moving to live near my daughter, spending lots of fun time with my grandson, doing the creative homey things I don’t have enough time to do now (sewing, knitting, cooking what I like), sitting under a tree and reading well-written fiction, visiting my women friends in Albany for days at a time. Getting in my car and visiting people I know up and down the East Coast. Spending February with my cousins in Florida.
I don’t think about taking workshops or mind-wrestling with the unknowables or mining more of my sub- and un-consciousnesses.
But, of course, you never know. The mystic in me might just be biding her time, waiting for the luxury of freedom.

The weblog doesn’t give any information about who is behind the site (and I wish it would), but the informational posts provide very useful information. I know that there are caregivers who read Kalilily Time and who might appreciate this relatively new blog.
This is what the site says about itself:

CareShare Network is primarily a platform for caregivers to communicate with each other, but every voice is welcomed in the dialogue. It provides commentaries, original articles and abstracts of caregiving- and related-news stories for its visitors. The platform is not just for news briefs and alerts but also for sharing, discussing and analyzing this important issue that affects an estimated 34 million people and their families in this country.

I planted at least a dozen asiatic lilies, the majority of which became snacks for the various squirrels, chipmunks, racoons, and groundhogs that populate our acres. There are three lilies in the back that are just beginning to bloom, and the one pictured above, which actually made it through to fruition.
But the battle for survival still goes on.