TheBanyanTree: Looking Out My Back Door

[Suzanne Stewart]

I'm very sorry about Fred and Ethel, too. I was so fond of the story, a
year or more ago, about Fred and Ethel welcoming in the lost migrating
duck, that I wrote Theta not too long ago and asked her for it again. It's
a great story about domesticity and wildness and genetic programming. And
two wonderful personalities.

I have lived where we could hear hoarse, gutteral cries from the canyon and
hills in the night--mountain lion? bobcat? some mysterious Other? And there
were losses. Theta is right: it can be glorious and terrible at the same
time, when the wild is close by. I miss the depth of that experience (but
am so glad I had it).

Suzanne
(once resident in the California Sierra foothills)





 t 01:48 PM 5/4/2003 -0700, Cecil wrote:
>At 1:00 PM -0700 5/4/03, Theta Brentnall wrote:
>>I don't get much pleasure, looking out my back door today.  Things are much
>>too still in the back yard.  When I went out this morning on the daily hunt
>>for Ethel's egg, I found only sorrow.  Something big and fierce invaded the
>>yard last night.  There are tracks of a cat much larger than a house cat,
>>most likely a bob cat's track, in the soft dirt of the flower beds, and
>>only a scattering of feathers where Ethel made her nest in the iris.  There
>>was another pile of feathers down by the back fence and no ducks.  No Fred
>>and Ethel at all.  My poor duckies.
>
>Oh darn, Theta! I'm shocked and saddened. I'm glad, though, that I had the
>opportunity to see those ducks.
>
>Tearful hugs,
>
>Cecil
>______________________________________
>            TheBanyanTree             
>  post to: TheBanyanTree at remsset.com  
>site: http://remsset.com/thebanyantree
>