Cloudy with a chance of...

by Mary Reiman

Cloudy. How many times do we comment that it's a cloudy day? How many pictures are posted of clouds? Yes, I am one of those mesmerized by cloud formations, so much so that I stop the car in the middle of a country road to hop out and get a photo, hoping it will be the perfect representation of the wonder of weather.

Four types of clouds are cumulus, cirrus, stratus and nimbus. We don't often say, "Wasn't that a lovely cumulus?" OR "I just loved the nimbus this morning." No, we take pictures of the shapes and colors and designs of cats, dogs, and faces we see swirling overhead. I know I saw my grandpa's nose one day. He had a very predominant nose!

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is the title of a children's book written by Judi Barrett in 1982. I was an elementary librarian at that time and I could have read that book to every class, every day. The children loved it! It was filled with all kinds of food raining down on the town named Chewandswallow, giving people new ways of looking at the weather, the environment, the world. It brought about great discussions with the students. That's what we need every day. New ways of looking at things.

One of the definitions of clouds includes the words streaked, mottled, opaque, muddy, obscure and unclear.  

Some days seem to bring mottled moments, opaque ideas, muddy commentaries, obscure ideas and unclear thinking. Things that make us shake our heads in amazement, in awe, in anger, and sometimes in fear. 

Some days seem more cloudy than others. Things happen, life quickly changes direction. It all gets murky. But we need those clouds. They remind us to use our imagination. To look at the world in different ways, seeing art transitioning across the sky as clouds change formation, whether they are cumulus or nimbus, dogs or cats or noses. All part of the wondrous cosmic universe that we are thankful for every day.

Perhaps Judi Barrett will write another book...Cloudy With a Chance of Mayhem.

Like us on Facebook at 5 Women Mayhem

The price of Grace

 

By JoAnne Young

Photos by Dana McNeil 

My first meeting of Bob, Grace, Mia and the others was through photographs – black and white gorgeously toned images of the colony of cats Dana McNeil had begun to watch over. 

 

These feral cats had become her project on two fronts – first an idea for nurturing of creatures who had walked at different times up a grassy hill from the wild of a wooded area that separated her townhome from a more transient population in a nearby mobile home park. During her developing bond with the cats a second project came to be when she made an artful recording of their presence to share in Barbara Hagen’s Photo IV class at Southeast Community College. 

 

Her journey started in the late spring of 2019 with Grace, a green-eyed tortoiseshell feline she described as shy but sometimes fierce. Captivated, Dana began to take food to the edge of Grace’s woodland habitat. Trust began slowly, and eventually Grace, about a year old, would edge up to the patio for a daily feeding. 

 

“To me, she seemed lost, sometimes aimlessly wandering through my neighborhood,” Dana wrote in the statement that accompanied her photo project. 

 

She seemed to be searching for the humans who had either carelessly or intentionally left her on her own. 

Grace couldn’t know and Dana may not have known yet, but their lives were beginning to knit together. Sometimes love between humans and animals – even wilder ones -- happens this way, at first unspoken, communicated with eye contact and subtle body movements.

Dana began researching and learning about feral cats. When Grace showed up with a rounding belly, she decided she would wait for the kittens’ births and their weaning, and then work with the Cat House in Lincoln to trap her and take her to All Feline Hospital to be spayed and vaccinated. The cat would then spend her days in Dana’s garage, acclimating to what would eventually become her home. 

It took three weeks, with Dana – who is a ballet dancer – sometimes dancing in her garage studio, hoping to calm the hiding cat with music. 

 

“One morning when I came down to feed her, she started rubbing against my legs, tentatively licking the raspberry jam off my toast when I sat down on the floor, mesmerized by the change.” 

 

And elated. 

 

And over the next few months, Grace learned to accept human love and give it back, with kisses and head butts, lap time and “drooling out of the sheer pleasure of life,” Dana said. 

 

And now there’s five who visit the back patio, all feral, walking daily out of the woods, cautious but curious: Bob, the soulful patriarch, who looks the part of the long-haired caped crusader; Mia, who like Grace is a beautiful marble gray tabby; Archie, all gray; Lucy, a light gray tabby; Lola, a tuxedoed male, thought to be female until neutering revealed differently. 

I visited the back patio on a Monday evening in October and was lucky to meet the five in a discrete sort of way. They kept their distance until I went into the house and watched them through a window. But I was thrilled to see them, and also catch a sighting of a gorgeous, curious young fox that wandered in from the woods that night. 

 

I know many of my friends are dog people, but I love the cats and their curiosity, quirkiness, and the way you know they love or at least appreciate you, but in a really indifferent sort of way. Dana has done the cats such a gracious favor, but they can only show their gratitude with the quasi trust they have given for her offer of food and mini shelters on the patio. 

 

Bob and company came around close to the start of the pandemic and unknowingly helped Dana through it, every day becoming part of her life, allowing her to turn away for short times from the worrisome news to which we all were subjected and to be absorbed in caring for them. It became, as Alwyn Moss wrote in “Never Love a Feral Cat,” a form of prayer when life on every level seems devalued. 

 

“I felt I was putting kindness out in the world," Dana said, "at a time when we’ve never seen such unkindness.” 

 

In her wildest dreams, she could not have imagined she would become a caretaker for a family of abandoned and feral cats. 

 

“But our unspoken bond is now a promise I must keep," she said. "For that, my friends, is the price of Grace.” 

This Is Hallowed Ground....

 By Marilyn Moore

These words were said by the minister who officiated at a graveside service.  He referred to the space in which we were standing, the space in which my friend’s father’s ashes would be buried.  He noted that the ground was hallowed not because of any proclamation, nor because of legal action by a governing board to set aside a designated cemetery space. It was, instead, hallowed by the love of family and friends of the man who had died, joined in spirit with the love and the memories that are gathered across the decades for all those whose remains are buried in that space.  He noted that the ground is hallowed by the faith of those present and of those who are buried there, and that the ground is also hallowed by the lives the deceased have lived, making their homes and communities better places to be.  

I have not captured all that he said, but the phrase “hallowed ground” has lived with me since I heard it.  I don’t hear “hallowed” as a descriptor, or a verb, very often.  I remembered it was used by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, so I looked it up.  His words, said in 1863 upon the occasion of dedicating a portion of the Gettysburg battlefield as a cemetery, “But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”  The minister’s words echo Lincoln’s theme…the ground is hallowed not because someone says so, but because of what has happened.  

Following that graveside service, I drove across Nebraska for a family gathering.  In this early November time of year, the ground is evident.  Most crops are harvested; some remain to be cut.  In some fields, the ground is green with newly planted winter wheat, which will go dormant over the winter.  In some fields, the stalks of recently cut crops remain, and they will remain over the winter, holding the earth in place.  In some fields, crops are still standing, awaiting harvest, their grain having been produced from the richness of the Nebraska soil.  And in pasture lands, varieties of long-stemmed and short-stemmed grasses are hunkering down for the winter, their roots plunging deep into the ground.

It occurs to me that this ground, the the ground that sustains the plant life that sustains all of us, is hallowed, too.  Ancient understandings of the natural world described four elements: earth, water, air, and fire.  All were understood to be important, all were understood to be connected to the others, and in some cultures there were gods or goddesses of each.

Today we know that there are many elements, 118 on the Periodic Table of Elements at present count.  And we know that earth, water, and air are composed of many elements.  We know that fire is a process.  So we know more than the observers of the natural world millennia ago.  But I hope we have the same reverence for those elements, that we recognize the connections among them, that we indeed hallow the earth, the water, and the air. 

Climate change, caused by human activity, is accelerating at a scary pace.  We see and feel the impact in air and in water, with more extreme temperatures, air pollution from fires that burn hotter and longer because of drought, rising ocean levels and more severe hurricanes because of rising temperatures, causing glaciers to met at a more rapid pace.  

The components of climate change affect the ground, too.  Hot weather and drought and strong winds increase erosion, with topsoil literally blowing away.  Higher flood waters that take longer to recede cause damage to the soil that will take years to regenerate, if ever it does.  And as the amount of arable land decreases, the earth that sustains us is less able to do so.  There are increasing number of climate migrants in many places on the planet, those people who are forced to move because the ground and the water that have supported their way of life for centuries is no longer able to do so.  

The ground upon which we stand, that grows our food, that captures rain and holds it for living, growing plants and animals, is remarkable.  It sustains and perpetuates itself with the constant life cycles of decaying plant matter on the surface and below the surface.  The loam that is common in this part of the country is composed of about 50% of sand, silt, clay, and organic matter, and 50% of pockets for air and water.  Left to its own devices, this ground will always support life.  

The question before us, as with our air and our water, is will we take the actions that we must take to preserve it, to assure that our world will be able to sustain life.  This is not just an individual question, though of course our individual actions matter, but a collective question…and a collective question for the whole world.  It’s not just a technical question, but a question of will…and that is much more challenging to face.

Like the ground in a Lincoln cemetery, or the ground in the battlefield at Gettysburg, the ground in Nebraska fields and in yards and gardens and fields everywhere on earth, is hallowed not because of what someone says, but because of what we collectively will do.

Follow us on Facebook at 5 Women Mayhem.