let it snow

The first year we moved into our house, it snowed for a couple of days and we wandered the neighborhood buried to the ankles in snow that obliterated all street edges and property boundaries. Each year since then, it seems we get less and less snow. The temperature hovers just enough above 32 degrees to keep us from getting a decent accumulation. All we get these days is wimpy snow-semi-storms that last long enough to give us about an inch, which manages to make the trees look beautiful and sparkly, but seems to be immediately followed by rain that takes everything away before you can get a pot of soup on the stove and start a jigsaw puzzle. Still, it's beautiful while it lasts, and everywhere I look there are possibilities for post cards, like this:



Too bad it lasts less than a day after the rain starts. Too bad we can't get to at least 31 degrees for a while, for long enough to give us at least a few days to enjoy the scenery. And I can't help but wonder whether this is just a series of warmer winters or if it's a permanent shift, giving us less and less snow every year until we get to a point where it's just a memory.

one more makes five

We recently acquired a fifth cat,
increasing our cat to human ratio to frightening proportions.
Don't they look innocent?

ravioli time

Other families might carve pumpkins or go to harvest festivals or search for just the right turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, but in our family when November rolls around we make homemade ravioli -- but not the kind where you crank out enough for dinner from a little pasta-making machine. We work in the thousands.

It's all in the hands.



We are siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandchildren, and an ever-changing array of visitors, working in an assembly line Henry Ford could never have envisioned, moving from table to table kneading, rolling, spreading, pressing, cutting, flouring, and packing into boxes anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 ravioli at a time. Only those who have graduated to rolling status are allowed to roll the large sheets of dough onto which the spinach/beef filling must be spread with a precise thickness that becomes a yearly topic of conversation or argument, depending on one's perspective and level of involvement.

Eight year olds work alongside eighty year olds, the latter passing the magic touch onto the former.

And it's all in the hands.

blogthings

Almost every day I read a blog called "Red Shoe Ramblings" which is written by a woman whose profile describes her as "a shoe-addicted, book-loving, photo-crazed quilt artist living in Kentucky." She writes about her life and posts photos of flowers, scenery, arty things and herself. Sounds kind of boring but really, it's not. It's very interesting and inspirational to me. Anyway yesterday on her blog she had this link to a website called "blogthings" where there are these fun little quizzes you can take about yourself and then put the results on your own blog -- like "What your pizza says about you" and "What city are you?" and "What famous work of art are you?" I was intrigued with one that asked, "What pattern is your brain?" Now how, really, could I pass that up? Here's my result:

Your Brain's Pattern

Your brain is always looking for the connections in life. You always amaze your friends by figuring out things first. You're also good at connecting people - and often play match maker. You see the world in fluid, flexible terms. Nothing is black or white.

What Pattern Is Your Brain?

I've always thought I had kind of a weird brain, and "purple radiating circular tie-dye kind of pattern" seems right to me.

But here's the funny part.
I went back and did another one, called "What color should your blog or journal be?" and I got this:

Your Blog Should Be Purple

You're an expressive, offbeat blogger who tends to write about anything and everything. You tend to set blogging trends, and you're the most likely to write your own meme or survey. You are a bit distant though. Your blog is all about you - not what anyone else has to say.

What Color Should Your Blog or Journal Be?

Now I have never thought of myself as particularly purple-oriented (um... there is that title up there....), but since my two favorite colors are red and blue, I guess it makes sense. As for the "summary" I would say most of it rings true. I'm not totally sure what a "meme" is and I might be too lazy these days... or too distant... to actually write a survey of my own. But otherwise ... well ... yeah ...

Now click on the link and go take your own little quiz!

it's a rat

The other morning I was reading my emails and drinking a cup of coffee when I heard this eeeking noise on the other side of the room. I looked over there and found three of our cats circled around what I thought was a mouse. I managed to pick it up with a magazine and put it out in the garden, figuring nature could just take its course.

But of course the cats decided to go get it. So the next thing I knew, Stephen was carrying it in all cupped in his hands. He ended up putting it in a plastic box in the garage. I mentioned that what we needed was a snake person, and we talked about how we should probably put it out of its misery and kill it. Stephen, not being an animal killer in general, spent some time later in the garage with a large spatula in his hand, thinking he should whack it, but in the end we are big chickens and neither of us could kill it. We thought it would just die during the night, but in the morning when I went to look, it was still alive.

So I did a Google and discovered that there is a lot of information out there about how to care for wild baby mice and rats. Soak a piece of bread with milk and drip it in their mouths. Feed them soy milk. Esbilac. Kitten milk replacement. Make sure it doesn't suck in any air because rats don't burp. And my personal favorite: be sure to massage it's backside so it can go to the bathroom. I also found a website that described the differences between a mouse and a rat, which is when I figured out that it was a rat.

So of course I started feeding it. Several times a day. And once during the night. And massaging it to make it go to the bathroom. And Stephen put little felt mice in the box to keep it company. And of course we had to take a picture.

It may be crazy, but it seemed like the right thing to do. And one of the things I like about us is that we do these things.

After a couple of days I posted a message on craigslist that I needed help with a baby rat. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were plenty of people out there with lots of information. I also discovered that there is woman known as "The Rat Lady" in Chico. I emailed her and got a response right away that she would take him. A couple of days later we brought him to her house. We were amazed and impressed by the number of rats (in cages) she had in her house. There must have been a dozen cages in what was once a living room. Some of the cages were rigged so the rats could scamper up a tube and sit up on top of the cage. We also found out that she was an advisor on the movie, "Ratatouille" which we had thought was very well done for a cartoon. She told us that we had a roof rat and assured us that she would take care of the little guy until he was old enough to be released in the wild.

Anyway, now the baby rat has a new home and we can get back to normal around here. Until the cats bring in another critter we'll need to rescue.

she don't look back

I call myself an artist in hopes that I will be forgiven
for dirt clods on the kitchen floor, for not remembering birthdays
or to scrub the pine sap off patio chairs before barbeques.

“Well, you know, she’s an artist,” people will say.

I can see millimeters of new growth on a fallen manzanita
from twenty paces and single blades of grass waving across the yard
but somehow two sets of muddy cat prints tracked across
the bathroom counter between perfume bottles and toothbrushes
are beyond my scope.


R. Goularte ~ 2007

alive and budding

Manzanita

One day after the surprise of snow, so heavy that
pine trees looked as though they had been bound for transport:
no longer triangular, carved to elongated ovals,
branches turned to giant snow globs hanging to the ground --

back there in the far corner of the yard the old manzanita,
taller than the apple tree, twisted branch trunks heavy with snow
quietly pulled itself up and over out of the ground
cracked its tap root and defied us to try to save it.



We tried to save it, a small crew of friends pushing and tugging to try to stand it back up, shove it back in its own hole. It creaked and groaned and resisted, so we left it lying on the ground and pondered whether to leave it there or turn it into firewood. Three months later it sent out new green buds on every branch, so we decided to just let it stay where it is and do whatever it's going to do.

Procrastination sometimes pays off.

rotten at the core

chunks of trunk
lay in the yard
waiting for chainsaws

I live in a town that was once a forest.
Tall, old trees are taken for granted as part of the community.
Until they fall.

One day in December a hundred-year-old black oak tree in our front yard fell over. It took with it two adolescent cypress trees and the wire that supplied electricity to two houses. Instantly this created half a day's work for several public employees, and a now-sunny front yard which had only moments before been shade-filled and had given us privacy. After basic cleanup, we inspected the roots and found a rotten core, black and squishy. This in a tree that had shown no signs of disease or stress, a tree that presented itself to the sky as strong, healthy, and dominant.

On the outside, everything was fine.
It was the rotten core that did it in.
Seems to me there's some kind of lesson there.