Sometimes I wish I could kill things. I mean, you know--more things. I can do mosquitoes, if theyre sticking me or obviously hell-bent--though I always send a sorry to the Dalai Lama when I do it. Fleas, when theyre swarming an animal. Though even here, I sometimes waver, seeing how hard they try to survive when theyre put in water. Flies sometimes, in August, when the fact that we live near cows comes home on wings, and I suddenly cant stand it and launch a pogrom that leaves fly guts spattered all over the kitchen. Thats the word I always think: pogrom; thinking of that word, I believe, shortens the duration of my attack. I also think, screens would help but then how would the cats come in and out? And I love being able to open the window and toss out scraps to the waiting hens. As usual, then, upon reflection, it is largely my own doing. I think of all the time I might have saved, how much more I might have done if I hadnt troubled to fish all those gnats from paint cans--larger insects are even more time-absorbing, in that you sometimes have to rinse them off. Or box elder beetles, which we call Halloween bugs because theyre black and orange and emerge in October--who but a fool would stoop to flip a beetle to its feet, lift it from the water bowl, a dozen times a day? Check every single piece of firewood, all fifty thousand pounds of it per season, to avoid incinerating any spiders or other people who may have ridden in with the load? In a little basket in the bathroom, where the clippers live, I’ve always kept a piece of stiffish paper for fishing little spiders from the tub and sink. The present one has been in use for 13 and a half years. I know that because it’s a ticket from a state park in New York and it has the date on it, September 23, 2011. 9/11 had just happened. During those days you didn’t have to talk to people to know it was what they were thinking about. I found it amazing, that palpable sense of so many beings being conscious on the same page all at once. For a minute. Before we were told that the best thing we could do was go back to our shopping. I see that I am confessing to a kind of extremism: surely this level of aversion, this squeamishness is a sign of an unbalanced mind? I do know that things die that others may live; that for every fertility god there is a Shiva standing by with a knife; that for every anabolic process of metabolism, there is a corresponding, and equally necessary, catabolic process which breaks down what has been built. And yet—I seem utterly unable to wield the knife. I’ve been thinking that maybe my extremism, like all other forms, is in large measure a creation of its opposite. That is, maybe I could be more laissez-faire about it all if I didn’t see everywhere so much evidence of that other kind of extremism, expressed in a disregard for life in all its forms: from Boka Haram to the slaughter of elephants, from drone missiles to oil spills, the murder of the oceans, children at our borders, prisoners at Guantanamo, the disappearance of bats, the death of bees. Gaza. I don’t see me getting there any time soon. Just this morning Lu came in with this tiny kitten she’d found over in the barnyard, foundering in the muck, its eyes glued shut with gunk. I know there are probably people who might just have squashed the little bugger. Or did the ever popular drown-the-kittens-in-a-bag. But no. Here he is, with Buddy the crippled rooster, rescued this winter from the jaws of a fox. Foolish women—particularly so in Buddy’s case since we ourselves often want to kill roosters, of whom there are too many, and which makes for a very trying time for the hens. But when it gets right down to it, we can’t. Neither could we give them, when we had the chance, to someone who was going to feed them to his alligator. We discussed offering the fox a frozen turkey someone gave us, in recompense for her lost rooster. Extremely yours, Ruth
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 15:34:23 +0000
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