The call of the wild

I grew up in the hills south of San Jose, which at that time was a city dotted heavily with apricot and plum orchards and fields of garlic and strawberries. At twelve, I spent a summer with my older cousin picking “cots” and cutting them, laying them out on big wooden trays to dry in the sun, making enough money to fund the things my parents wouldn’t, like psychedelic posters.

Spending a weekend at Pantheacon, which happens in a big hotel surrounded by miles of industrial parks and fast food franchises, where in my memory I can see those orchards, is always a bit challenging. Especially because Pcon falls in the time of year those orchards would be blooming - if they still existed.

Driving home, on the brilliantly warm Monday, I found myself doing a little sing song chant about needing more nature in my nature religion and naming all the things I would do that day out in the garden. "Come on in, nature, let the dirt get under my fingernails!", I sang. Yes, sometimes alone in the car I can appear rather crazy.

So, I came home and did those things. I weeded, I turned over soil, I feed my worms and I sat in the garden, just inhaling the beauty of California in February. Dirt was under my fingernails.

Later, I was in my living room, going through seed catalogues, when I heard strange sounds from my back room. My cat was making a weird meow and there were crashing sounds and what turned out to be beating wings against glass. A blue jay had mysteriously gotten in the house though the back door…which is under stairs and not a clear passage way for a bird. Nature was where it should not be. It took a long time, and a refrigerator was moved, things broke, and there were moments I feared I would kill the bird in trying to save it. But I saved it. It finally joined the mate who had been screeching thoughout the entire debacle, and both rested in the blooming plum tree next door.

I laughingly said to friends and family that maybe I’d invoked nature a little too hard on that drive back. Last night, the joke went way too damn far. I picked up what I thought was a flower on a stem that must have fallen out of an old arrangement I’d thrown in the compost a few days before. But it was not a flower. It was not a stem. It was mouse entrails and a tail. The horror.

I am fifty five years old. I’ve done many things in my life. But I have NEVER held mouse entrails and a tail in my bare hands. And it’s been years since my old cats have shown any interest in hunting. There was nothing normal about this occurrence.

The wild has been calling a little too incessantly in the past few days. Nature has been where it is unnatural to be. And the thing is, usually these things happen in threes. I’m just waiting now for the ant invasion.