PIA

Post-covid author visits still seem like a nostalgic novelty, but I did one this week—traveling to the southernmost edge of Virginia in my Little Red Truck.* This visit was emotionally intense and also had all the lightness of a springtime ramble in the hills. But also, while I was away, The Hatke Family Cat passed away. 

My Cat.

I say “My Cat” but we’d broken up, actually. She moved out years ago and went to live with the man in the house just across the abandoned railroad tracks. Still close enough to know she was there, but rather definitively Not With Us. 

Still, the thread of her life stretched back almost to the beginning of our family. She came to us as a kitten and we never knew her exact age, but she was nearly as old as my daughter, Angelica, who is twenty.

The river keeps flowing no matter what you do.

*More about this author visit soon. Kind of a lot happened.

Schmalentines Day

 I remember when my sister was in high school and wrote this snarky Valentine's Day song. I'm glad she's still singing her offbeat originals (with her daughters!)

Whistle Sister

 Here is a video of my sister and my nieces, recorded behind the old forge at my parents place in Indiana. This video made my day.

Yesterday I took a walk at the land near the river during that last breath of twilight and watched a barn owl drift like a slow ghost over a field of fireflies. It turned silent figure eights, dove into the grass and resurfaced. It passed close enough to me that even in the lost light I could clearly see it's dark alien eyes and tiny beak. 

I played a song for Ida and then drove home in the dark.

*edit: How did I miss typing the word "owl" in the first draft of this post?

Petra

 

On Friday, November 19th, in the wee hours of the morning and at the end of a lunar eclipse, our own Petra Luna sauntered—not to say leapt— out from behind the curtain and onto the Great Stage to the sound of applause and into a host of loving arms. 

She’s beautiful and perfect and I love her.* 

And it’s scary, though. This time, at this late hour, after tragedy and heartbreak and with much of my youthful brashness worn away, it’s more frightening than it’s ever been before. The weight of love.

One of the things that Ida’s death left me with was an ever-present awareness of how quickly everything can change. 

Here’s another many-months-old scrap from my journal:

*even though, like all babies, she is notoriously difficult to draw.

Lessons from a Goat

How did it come to this?

In my experience this is the kind of question you ask yourself on a steamy August morning when you have your arms around a urine-soaked goat, when the smell is ripe, and you’re struggling to hoist it into a makeshift harness hanging from the rafters. 

I never intended to have goats in my life. They just sort of wandered in. 

Well, the truth is that we do have a nice, flat yard. And we had a pretty aggressive and thorny blackberry hedge growing along the back fence. So when some friends sold their old Virginia farm and moved into town we took on their goats. There were three white females and old Gruffy. 

We’re gonna come back to Gruffy. 

We put up a solar powered electric fence to keep them from wandering off. The fence never seemed to work, and I also never really understood how it worked. We also didn’t know that two of the three females were pregnant. I found that out when my daughter called me one Saturday as I was driving back from yoga, to say that something was …happening with one of the goats. That was an interesting Saturday. 

So then for awhile we had baby goats, and they were cute. I mean aggressively cute. It wasn’t natural. But they were also impossible to contain. They were no end of trouble. 

So we ended up giving all the goats, except for old Gruffy, to a family that was much more equipped to care for them (as we were loading them for transport, one of the baby goats gave me a parting gift of getting loose and head-butting the crap out of my van’s windshield). 

All that was a few years ago. Since then it’s just been Gruffy and his special lady friend. His special lady friend is a sheep, by the way. She's sweet and fluffy, and I find their relationship charming as hell. (I’m the last one to separate the sheep and the goats.) I still grumbled about having a goat in my yard, though. You know, from time to time...

Then, in the hottest part of this last summer, Gruffy got sick. 

He stopped eating. He lost clumps of hair. He got terribly, terribly thin. He stopped standing up. 

He was in pretty bad shape when I put him on a tarp and dragged him from the back of the field to the shade in the tree by the back door. I was pretty sure he had parasites, so I bought goat dewormer and fed it to him. It didn’t seem to help. I was pretty sure Gruffy was going to die. 

What do you do with a dead goat? I wondered.

We called a vet to come look at him. 

The vet arrived in a big, white truck. He was just what you’d hope for in a country vet—calm and friendly, but not chatty—clearly more interested in the animal than the people connected to it. He gave Gruffy a shot of *real* medicine (apparently it was amateur hour with my deworming pellets). And then he told us that Gruffy might recover, but he really was in pretty bad shape. And he told us what we’d have to do for the goat every day. 

And so I found myself, in the back half of August, working with Gruffy every day. It wasn’t just feeding and watering. He needed to be lifted up and held in a standing position. He needed his legs massaged to get the blood back into them. He needed to relearn how to walk. Even when laying down he needed to be flipped from one side to another throughout the day. In the mornings he was soaked in his own filth. He smelled just awful. 

I smelled just awful. 

I washed up as much as I could but Gruffy had a pungency that really stuck to you. You’d get little whiffs of it. 

I grumbled a lot. Sometimes to myself, but more often out loud. But I wasn’t working alone. We all worked together to help Gruffy. I was just the most complainy about it. 

Eventually we dragged him into a shed and I rigged a sort of harness from the rafters so that he could stand for longer stretches of time without having me right there to stop him from falling. We gathered branches of vitamin-rich leaves to feed him. 

And he got better. He started walking on his own. He stopped needing the harness. He fattened back up. 

We had a nice, sturdy fence installed to enclose the field. A proper farm fence. 

Gruffy is out there now, with his lady friend (her name is Stella). They are munching happily on Autumn grass. It’s all pretty damn idyllic. I even made them supporting characters in the book I’m working on (under different names—the last thing I need is a legal battle with farm animals). 

How did it come to this?

I don’t actually think there’s a better question. I think it’s just about whether or not you can laugh when you ask it. 

Frog Pond

 So my dad started a youtube account.

What's that?

Why yes, it is a funny time to have parents, isn't it?

He’s an architect, this dad of mine, and so that’s what his videos are about. It’s a series of short stories and tidbits from the history and practice of architecture. Here’s one that I like a lot—it’s about various methods used to adjust the movement in very tall buildings:

Here’s another one about the legend of how the Corinthian column developed and how that eventually lead to one of the most famous drawings in history:

I love these videos. I love them because some of them surprise me and also because some of them—the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, for instance—are stories I’ve heard many times before (though, being a dad myself, I realize now that part of the job is telling the same story a thousand times but always with the same invincible innocence, like it’s brand new). 

I also love these videos because I love my dad, and these are very much him.*

It was my dad, of course, who first taught me that drawing is not just fun, but a very fundamental and powerful way to communicate. When I’d ask a question he more often than not he’d grab a notecard and a pen from his front shirt pocket and draw the idea out (he always wears button-down shirts, often pink, and always with pens and notecards in the pocket).

So if you enjoy these, feel free to like and subscribe.

*Okay, I also love that you can see the full series DVD collection of Thundercats in the background, but you didn’t hear that from me.