Frida Kahlo the Squirrel RIP

This is a post I did not want to write. I've been putting if off for weeks as though writing it would make it so. But we're leaving Florida in the morning and heading back to Nevada so it's time to wrap things up around here.

Frida stashing a nut

I am very sad to report that Frida Kahlo the squirrel is MIA and almost certainly dead. And I'm feeling pretty guilty because I played a part. I've been feeding a lot of squirrels and birds all summer and, of course, the inevitable happened. A hawk noticed and started hanging around. Then Frida vanished.

Frida stashing a nut

She's gone. It's been weeks. We both really miss her and feel the great big empty place she left behind. That probably sounds odd. After all, what kind of relationship can you have with a squirrel? But we got really attached to her. Frida had moxie. I'm embarrassed to use that word, it's corny, but it fits her. Every morning, while the other squirrels were busy chasing each other around the yard arguing over who could have a peanut, Frida was busy licking then stashing all the peanuts, one by one, into separate hiding places.

Frida enjoying a morning peanut.

And when I threw peanuts down from the balcony, all the squirrels took off except Frida. She'd look me in the eye, cup her hands and wait for the toss.

Frida ascends her pineapple palm.

Then, once everything was done and tucked away, she'd scamper up into her pineapple palm to savor a peanut in peace. No one dared approach her in her tree. Frida Kahlo the squirrel was like Frida Kahlo the painter... as they say... una perra nacida... born a bitch.

Frida Kahlo savoring a peanut in her favorite pineapple palm tree

That tree was hers and hers alone, and even though she's gone, it's still empty.

Ghost of Frida Kahlo visiting us.

That is except recently one morning. M. Lee call me to come quick to the window, that the ghost of Frida Kahlo had come back to say goodbye. It looked like her. It felt like her. And no, we haven't seen her since but I get the feeling that, wherever she is, Frida Kahlo is doing just fine.

Feliz Cumpleaños Frida Kahlo,104

In honor of the 104th anniversary of the birth of the very excellent surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, I hope you will enjoy this video montage of her work.

Frida Kahlo, July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954

Gracias siempre, mi amiga.

Battle Royale

Frida Kahlo savoring a peanut in her favorite palm tree.

The Great Peanut War of 2011 is currently raging here in our tiny dead end hamlet along Alligator Creek. I suppose it's my fault. After we settled in I started sprinkling peanuts around the base of the pineapple palm for Frida Kahlo and, at first, all was good. She came, ate a few and tucked the rest around the yard for later. Diego Rivera showed up shortly after I started putting out a seed mix designed to attract red-headed birds. No surprise. Squirrels love sunflower seeds. Then, of course, the very passionate Leon Trotsky made his appearance. A couple of days later we worried that he had died in a fall from the porch after a failed assault on a bag of peanuts. I'd foolishly left them by an open (screened) window. Since then we've watch him fall several times more, once after attempting to hurl himself through a screenless (closed) window. Perhaps another assault on my peanut stash, now in the laundry room, but who can know the mind of a squirrel? That time we heard his little claws scratching the glass as he slid down and into the bushes. Another time he miscalculated a leap after a rival and again launched himself into the bushes. He is a tough little dude.

Most recently the notorious clowns Larry, Moe and Curly joined the show. Now all five chase each other up and down the porch screens, drain pipes, over the roof, along electric wires, through the trees and around the yard but Frida Kahlo pays no mind. She comes when there are new peanuts under the pineapple palm, chooses one, licks it all over then scampers off to stash it in its own, unique secret hiding place. I don't know if she remembers where she puts everything but she repeats the ritual until all the peanuts are tucked safely away. As for the jokers? They are too busy fighting to notice.


Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, Larry, Moe and Curly at it again.

C'est la vie

The Visitation.
Frida Kahlo, the Gran Ardilla

It's an established fact that I love squirrels, well all animals, but this post is about squirrels. And, this summer, as previous ones here in Florida, there are several who come every morning for the peanuts I put around Frida Kahlo, the Gran Ardilla's, memorial pineapple palm tree. But this summer, other than Ragnar Halftail, the crew is a bunch of scraggly tailed imbeciles. They're cute but dumb as rocks. And lazy. To begin with, they're being sandbagged by a cluster of enterprising blackbirds. These fellows define the term "early bird". I had to change tactics. Now, instead of scattering peanuts around the tree, I wait till the little dolts get here then I toss nuts to them from the balcony. But there's no guarantee they will notice them, even when accidentally bonked on the head by one. And, if they do notice, chances are the simpletons immediately break into a fierce up, down and around the tree battle over it while the blackbirds dive-bomb from the fronds, scoop up the nuts and take off. And these dunderheads are picky. Sometimes one grabs a nut, smells it, drops it and goes for a piece of corn instead. The birds don't seem too interested in corn so I put plenty of that out. And, if a squirrel does decided to have a peanut, they are just as likely to scamper off and bury it in grass and yes, the smarty pants blackbirds loooove that. So, c'est la vie.

Literary road dogs and Alligator Creek

Sunday - last day - Georgia to Florida

Forget Kerouac and Cassady. Perhaps, they were never really all that anyway. For this five day drive from Portland, Oregon to Florida's gulf coast, Rilke, Odysseus Elytis, Roy DeG., Galway Kinnell and Billy Collins have been our literary traveling companions. I should say Billy McCollins because, for all his admittedly delightful surprise poetic twist endings, and being a former Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy really is the Rod McKuen of the hour. Sorry Billy, but you know it's true. Anyway, their company has been, in turns, painful (Billy's same-ie sameness), lofty (Odysseus's romantic Greek modernism), electrifying (Rilke), heartbreaking (Galway) and delightful (Roy DeG.).

M. Lee, Roy DeG. & me in K.C.

When we got to Florida we turned off I-75 to gas up and found ourselves in an alternate Elmore Leonard universe and stopping at the Sarasota Trader Joe's we entered the alternate universe of "ageless" women sporting every implant known to modern and primitive man plus some double, perhaps triple, implants and lifts known only to aliens and Jersey surgeons before which we could only stand in jaw-dropped awe.

Monday - home - Alligator Creek

The old place looks good. Since we were here last, Frida Kahlo's pineapple palm was (finally) pruned. There was even a young squirrel in it this morning eating a nut! Surely, she is one of Frida's descendants. And, wonder upon wonder, Sonny Boy still lives with his parents across the street. He's been out in the screen porch all morning expounding to his mother about the fat epidemic, environment disasters, jail, death, work (which he does not) and a variety of other subjects as flocks of white ibises fly over the twittering, splashing mangroves on their way to the beach. In the last year, we've spent more time on Alligator Creek than "home" in Nevada. It's comforting to see that something of the world as it was still lives there.

Morning Peanut

The morning janitor has come sweeping through the theatre of my mind and requested that I move along so here's a new top post just to honor the passing of time and our incessant need for something new.

Frida Kahlo enjoying a morning peanut.

The day in pictures

Gone with the wave

You looking at me looking at you.

Me looking at you looking at me.

It rained in the afternoon

so Frida Kahlo the Squirrel
took shelter on the porch.

As soon as it stopped

she made her exit across
the screen, house left.

That is all.

Mockingbird Arias for Autumn

It's a warm, sunny morning here on Alligator Creek and just this moment a mockingbird, perched on a frond in Frida Kahlo's pineapple palm, is singing her wild heart out. She's doing it all, from "Pretty Bird" to never-to-be-written Arias, one replacing the other with equal speed. Today is the Autumn Equinox, that brief moment when light and dark are equal. Now the days grow shorter and the night long.

FiveOWriteO

The term came out of one of those word jazz sessions Kristiana, M. Lee and I were having the other day, at my expense. At the time it was FiveOWriMo. Later I changed it to FiveOWriteO or its colloquial fiveowriteo. Of course, both are based on the now famous NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which has, over the years, kicked a significant number of people off their duffs to take the plunge, resulting in huge gobs and boatloads of words getting launched during the month of November and some manuscripts actually becoming published works of whatever. Even I managed to assemble 50,000 words one November spurred on by the collective frenzy. Don't ask. The deal with FiveOWriteO is to write for five minutes everyday, one day at a time. Of course, a commitment to write five, f-i-v-e,  5 little minutes a day will only be of interest to individuals suffering from writer's block, which includes me. "Writers write, Owen" . Smirk all you like, writer's block is a drag. So, of course, the important thing about a FiveOWriteO is the word "write" because write is a verb.

And yes, I've been telling myself for years to set a daily time and write. I used to tell myself to write four hours a day. When I failed at that I lowered the time to two hours a day, that became one, then one half-hour, which worked until it didn't.

I've been doing my fiveowriteo for about a month now and have gotten quite attached to this little morning interlude. God, that must sound so pathetic. I am embarrassed to discuss it, even here, but now Roy at Blogorahma has upped the stakes and started occasionally posting his five minutes worth (thanks a lot, Roy). His, of course, are good. Mine are not and they are really short but, these days, I'm grateful to be writing at all so, in the spirit of fun and fair play, I am posting this morning's fiveowriteo.

It's hard to make a beginning without a starting point. I do not have one. I start over and over from the middle of nowhere. Is it some kind of twisted snobbery to forego a beginning? A foundation? An idea? The spiral continues its twist. Over and over, Billy (Collins) starts at his window. It is not his privilege alone, something he himself makes abundantly clear. "The poets are at their windows." And I am at mine only, for now, my window is the screen porch.

I am sitting in my screen porch. It is morning. The black birds are at work on the peanuts and seeds. It is 2:26 PM in Addis Ababa. I have never been to Addis Ababa but have wondered about it since I was a child. I leave the porch and wander the shade of its narrow, winding, packed-sand passageways which open occasionally onto bazaars filled with wares and food of every description. The whole scene is ablaze with color and swelters under makeshift canopies and tents and throbs with a cacophony of voices, braying, cawing, banging and music. People look down on the scene from tiny balconies attached to brightly painted buildings.

And then I am back on Alligator Creek with the dive-bombing black birds who, in the time it took to visit Addis Ababa and return, snatched all the peanuts from under Frida Kahlo the squirrel's memorial pineapple palm tree before the squirrels arrive.

References:
Friday by Roy deGregory
Monday by Billy Collins

Squirrel Appreciation Day

The Shipping Squirrel enjoying Squirrel Appreciation Day.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day
and Inauguration Day for the President of the United States
but let's not forget the little people.
Today is also
National Squirrel Appreciation Day.
So get a bag of nuts and head over the your local park.
Time to spread the love!

Frida Kahlo the Squirrel appreciating a peanut

Notes from the porch

Life here along Alligator Creek can be deceptively simple. Days have a rhythm unlike other places we stay. It's an end of the road thing, days marked by sunrise and sunset, rather than the human impositions that generally mark time. And so, a week plus in, and I have hardly done a thing. Again, I am sitting in the screen porch, birds are chirping, Swami and Minerva are here also enjoying the light as it works its daily way through the fronds of Frida Kahlo pineapple palm. And, new to the troop, Molly McGee is also here enjoying the morning.

I haven't talked about Molly before although she appears in a couple of the photos I posted of our cross-country drive, not here but on instagram. But more about her later. I'm still sorting that one out myself. So. The day is far too begun. M. Lee is on a bike ride and I need to get out of here before he gets back. Otherwise, I will really feel like a slob.

Trip notes

We're in Kingman Arizona for the night. One more day and we'll be home but I'm really missing Florida. I miss Alligator Creek, the little house and the pineapple palms and I miss Frida Kahlo the squirrel and her friends. I miss all the critters who sing in the night. I miss the egrets and ibises. I miss the congregations of little plovers scurrying in and out with the waves. I miss watching the squadrons of venerable pelicans pass overhead, wings outstretched, gliding the thermals like ancient gods. I miss the Great Blue Heron who likes to people watch at the beach. I miss the friends we discovered there. I miss the gulf.

I am reading 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Gabriel García Márque as we drive across the country.

When we were in Dallas the other day we ate dinner at Kalachandji's, the very excellent vegetarian restaurant at the Hare Krishna temple. I lived at that temple many years ago.

Must sleep now. We have to drive through rush hour in Las Vegas tomorrow morning.

Barkie's Bad Night

Barkie in better days.

Poor Barkie. A bunch of humans got into a huge fight at his house last night. He probably hid under the bed the whole time they duked it out, threatening each other, screaming, yelling, crying. They were so loud I wouldn't be surprised if they also disturbed all the birds in the area as well as the raccoons and opossums. Opossums are especially timid. And surely Frida Kahlo the squirrel did not appreciate the ruckus though it didn't bother us. We were out on the deck staring over at his house through the dark like naked ghouls but Barkie, the poor bastard, was trapped in the house with those maniacs.

Finally the fight poured out into the street where we could see, whenever the fluky streetlight flicked on, several teenage girls circling each other as some guy yelled in a very loud voice.... "One punch. You get one punch. ONE!". Unfortunately at that point the streetlight flicker off again so we couldn't see who punched who but then one of the girls cried out, "Where are we going to sleep tonight?" and he yelled back, "At my house. Everybody into the car. Come on! Get in. Now! NOW!" The streetlight flicked on just in time for us to see them drive off. We haven't seen or heard Barkie this morning. I hope he's okay.