Crazy Stable

It may be Eastertide, time of resurrection, but there is some really cool dead stuff decorating the premises just now. Try to imagine the scenario whereby one of Bagel's kin managed to expire while half-inserted into our porch lattice. Heart attack? Cat ambush from within? Either way, it's one less quadruped whose pitty-patting feet will be heard within our walls. Daughter was the one who noticed that he appears "deflated." I feel like leaving him there to observe his passage into Squirrel Jerky; maybe I could get an NEA grant for that as a piece of installation art.

On the south side of the house, I've been doing just that--observing the slow dance of decay--on this beautiful blue jay since last fall. His feathers are still vivid, even as his little skull has started to emerge. I suppose I should inter him with respect somewhere (but not on top of one of the cats' graves).

Lest you think that all is rot and corruption around the CrazyStable, here are some proud-Mama shots of the front garden. Spirea (I think)...

vinca...and my brave pot of pansies, which Bagel dug up five times before I finally foiled him by laying pieces of slate across the soil. Hey, guy, you wanna see what happens if you mess with my flower pots? Check out your buddy up the alley.

Now I am terrified at the Earth,

it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

Walt Whitman