A not so "purrfect" start to my day

I’ve become a “sleep geek.”

In fact, most of the time I get enough good sleep (7-8 hours most nights) that I can wake up on my own at a predetermined hour without an alarm clock going off first.

Of course that is if I’m not stirred from my biorhythmic slumber by the undulating tortuous sound of my cat throwing up outside under my bedroom window.

There’s nothing quite like that kind of wake up call.

Invariably on any given morning I check to see if the cat wants in at 5 a.m., which is usually when I wake up. Sometimes the cat has one paw stuck through the crack in the door before I open it—a sure sign that it would like to come inside. 

Sometimes the cat is nonchalantly strolling up to the door looking this way and that, having just finished throwing up and knowing full well (after many similar episodes) that barfing in the early morning hour will send me to the door to give it a piece of my mind—at which point the cat saunters on by my scolding pointed finger and into the great indoors, as if I’m not even there.

But let’s not forget a third “cat at the door in the morning” scenario—the one where my cat does as writer Pam Brown touts and “works out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause the most inconvenience.”

That exact place would be about two body lengths away on the porch step seemingly unable to decide what to do next, while I stand there like a moron coaxing it with cat language as an army of mosquitoes hitch a ride into the house on my pajamas.

Then, just as I give up and close the door, the cat slips through the opening and—as William Lyon Phelps said—pours his body on the floor like water.

The routine is endlessly predictable.

The cat will inhale a mouthful of food, perhaps throw it up on the floor in the porch and go have a nap or want back outside again.

The latter choice is made clear to me by thwacking relentlessly with his paw on the screen door that leads into the kitchen after I’ve gone inside to have my critical first cup of coffee.

I have no idea how the stupid cat figured out how to do that. The first time I heard it I nearly had a heart attack thinking a stranger was trying to get in.

When I peered cautiously out, there was the cat staring at me gesticulating towards the outer door the way my border collie used to do when it wanted to go outside to pee.

And if all that cat drama isn’t enough to make me want to crawl back into bed for a sleep do-over, I can always open the door to find the cat sitting there with a Cheshire grin and the long tail of a field mouse still protruding and wriggling from its mouth wherein I bolt to the bathroom for my very own undulating tortuous round of morning sickness.

There’s nothing quite like that kind of wake up call either.

Loss for words met with gaggle of thought

Here’s the thing.

I could tell you that the fact that I don’t write a column every week is because I’ve been so busy with other things that I have no time for plunking out my chronicles on a keyboard.

But if I took that stance, my nose would grow like Pinocchio’s.

Truth be told, I have loads of time to write and more ideas and dreams and aspirations to write about than anyone can imagine.

Yet, I admit that on a daily basis I readily find countless other things to fill my time so that there is none left in which to write.

I’m a chronic procrastinator who blatantly denies and fights against a clear-cut opportunity.

Why is that?

How can I expect anyone to rely on that kind of hiccupped continuity?

And yet I tout my belief and confidence in the Universal plan, which is patient and nudges me with small reminders to put in face time with my laptop.

I can’t tell you how thick as thieves the its plan is around here, waving its green flag and leaving the days wide open for me the writer, even as I continue to put up roadblocks at nearly every turn.

Why is that?

Heaven knows there remains enough comedy and drama in my neck of the woods to fill the word count, including a very bold skunk, a demented squirrel, and a ghost deer that keeps eating the tops off all my budding flowers. 

Yet I feel like my writing is stooped in a vat of literary molasses.

No matter how I look at it, I am my own worst enemy, second-guessing my ability and believing the dream-stealing ego that resides in me, while everyone else around me knows better.

Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn, and Tom Russell wouldn’t be the writers and singers they are if they thought like that. Any good author in the entire world wouldn’t be one if they thought like that all the time. 

Perhaps my mind muddle is a product of the infinite slump born of a stunted summer that’s had me under a grip of relentless wind and rain.

It is my hope that the weeks will get warmer, the fall and winter catalogue will be delayed at the printers, and many more weekends will come my way out on Rainy Lake in a sailboat with my captain.

If nothing else, I once again can write about the 18 winged creatures who move about daily in long waddling lines in my yard, leaving behind their trademark green poo and enough goose down to start a pillow factory—all the while shaking their long necks in scold of me when I try to get to “my” barn or to “my” garden.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and the rabid skunk, demented squirrel, the flower bud eater, and the geese will pass through the yard at the same time and I’ll get a photograph. 

“Beth’s Wild Kingdom.” 

Yep, that’s my neck of the woods all right.

It's not a question of what, but who

When I was a little kid I wanted to be an animal keeper when I grew up and have an animal farm. That was going to be my life’s work—taking care of animals.

Maybe that dream was a spin-off of the “animal hospital” my mother always talked about. She said it was where all my toys went to get their “play wounds” mended when I went to bed at night.

And she was right. When I woke up in the morning, my teddy bear would have a neat little row of stitches and a Band-Aid, or perhaps a little white bandage covering the spot on his leg where the stuffing had once spilled out.

“Raggedy Anne” would have her eye sewn on again and the arm on my walking doll would be re-attached.

I believed in that imaginary animal hospital for a long time and planned my own such sanctuary for when I grew up.

I would build a cabin back in the woods on an old road known around here as, “Blueberry Mike’s,” and I would look after dogs and cats. I think I was 10 years old.

I dreamed I’d be an actress in Hollywood. I’d be “discovered,” given the dramatic role of my life, own a fur coat and a convertible, be famous, and be nominated for an “Oscar.”  I researched acting schools and modeling schools and planned a course for myself that would take me straight to the red carpet. I was 11 years old, I think.

I would be a biologist, too.

I used to sit in my dad’s canoe in the creek by our house as a young environmental observer and seine minnows, water spiders and big, fat bloodsuckers—you know the kind—the flat, wide black ones that slink in the tannin depths of creek water.

I studied mice and insects and birds and fishes and amphibians and by the time Christmas rolled around in 1972, my enthusiasm did not go unrewarded.

Under the tree, wrapped just for me, was Anna Botsford Comstock’s “Handbook of Nature Study.” It was 937 pages long. I was 12 years old.

I treated that book like it was made of gold. I collected cornflowers and leaves and four-leaf clovers and pressed them between the pages. I learned about wolves, and katydids, and salamanders, the earth, and the skies.

Ms. Comstock swept me away on a carpet of possibilities. The book’s yellow cover was worn off long ago, but the book remains on my bookshelf to this day, well loved and holding very old, flattened remnants of those pressed plants.

I’ve never lost my interest in all things “nature,” even though my desire to be a biologist waned long before I reached my mid-teenage years.

No matter. I had other dreams of “what” I wanted to be and the list grew to include a bush pilot, psychologist, flight attendant, and travel agent.

What I am today is no one of those careers. I am a mosaic, pressed out of many experiences and, in fact, I don’t think I will ever have an exact answer to the “what” I am.  

However, who I am is getting clearer every day.