Sagas, Seeds and Strays

And 'sects. Insects, that is. Ants, the little interlopers, were after my candied ginger earlier, but I caught them in the act! Yesterday, they were investigating the cat food. The tastes of ants elude me....

Little bit of everything going on around here, as usual. I finished Kate Morton's The House at Riverton last week, and thought it was fabulous. It's drawn comparisons to Daphne du Maurier, and while it doesn't achieve du Maurier's eeriness, the plotting and the characters are worthy of the description. The story is told in a series of flashbacks by an old woman who started work in the local manor house as a very young girl. Early on, her life becomes intertwined with the youngsters of the family, and the story has all the great elements of a Gothic classic: death, secrets, unrequited love, deteriorating ancestral home.

The larger picture Morton offers is of England, and the world, really, dramatically changed by World War I. The war changed everything, and people still reeling from the devastation of war were dealt further blows by the rapid changes in society created by the Jazz Age, flappers, automobiles and other facets of the same new outlook. I actually preferred the original title, The Shifting Fog, a metaphor for the way in which we view history. We look back and make guesses based on glimpses revealed to us as the "fog" of time shifts, only to find out later that what we thought we knew wasn't exactly right. No matter how much we study and research, Morton seems to say, we never get a clear picture of the whole, just bits and pieces that we struggle to fit together. Anyway, Kate Morton has earned her place on my list of authors that I scan pre-pub alerts for!

Although it's a bit late, I planted some seeds yesterday. Nothing fancy, just a few beets and cucumbers, along with a few straggling carrot seeds left over from last year. And, just for kicks, I also planted a few zinnias, in the vain hope that I would actually be able to cut flowers and bring them in the house. Veterinarians will tell you that cats are unrelenting carnivores. If this is the case, then John Henry is not a cat, but some malnourished, splotchy groundhog. He is an herbivore, to his own detriment, but undeterred! He gnaws on zinnias, gums philodendron, and overgrazed my lemon verbena until it was reduced to a green stick instead of a plant. Of course, he doesn't digest any of this, but that's another issue....

The kitty that's been showing up outside probably wishes it were an herbivore. Poor little thing was SO hungry last night, and she got two cans of cat food, or most of them. I was able to get close enough to really see her face. Her eyes look clear enough, but her little face has been scratched up quite a bit at some point. She wouldn't allow me to open the door until recently, would just bolt off into the weeds, but last night she allowed me to come and go through the back door several times and even allowed me to wriggle up to her while she was eating. (I'm sure I was quite a picture, crawling on my elbows down the slope in the backyard, trying not to swat mosquitoes too vehemently, cooing quiet kitty talk the whole time.) But then, while I was finishing dinner, a raccoon swiped the last of her dinner and when I went out to scold him, he absconded into the brush with a little blue Fiesta bowl that I really like! Am going to have to go kick around in the weeds and see if it turns up. With my luck, once he decided on take-out, he probably hauled it down to the creek where he could wash and eat in peace! Raccoons are very cute until they aren't. Seems like so many things are like that: relationships, sugar, rollercoasters - really good right up to the moment that they're really awful. Why is that?