Seventy-five, snakes alive!

Another very beautiful but very cold day!

Long interesting skype conversations with three of our children today, two connecting us with that wonderful rainbow-coloured thread, to parts of Africa, one 3,851 miles away, and the other 7,716 miles distant. The other call was from Boston, 30 miles away.  

I spent ages looking for a photograph I have of a snake eating a frog on our deck.  I was going to base my natural investigation entirely on this snake and its frog victim, but in fact it is now already late and I have not found it, so here are some other snakes I have seen in the meadow:

The beautiful markings of a Milk snake

Garter snake pretending to be a hose-pipe

Brilliant markings.

 Which is why you should always categorise your photographs so that you can easily find them.  Tim has his all done with the wonderful Keywords of Lightroom, and mine are just this nightmarish mess of dates.  If you can't remember when you took a photograph then tough! 

So a few minutes ago Tim just came over and rescued me in his usual knight in shining armour fashion, showing me how to find it in minutes!  I felt stupid and useless but he helped me see how that is silly and that the world is better if you ask for help!  

So here is what I found one day when I came home from school, a snake lying (it's weird that a snake can never sit or stand) on the deck slowly eating a frog.  Part of me was horrified by the slow death of the frog, the other was fascinated by the incredible jaws of the snake detaching themselves in order to swallow this enormous meal, and another bit was delighted that this was all happening right in front of me on my deck, to wake me up after my long day's teaching.

 It is rather gruesome but also amazing, isn't it?  We learn about such things in school, how snakes' jaws are attached to the braincase with tendons and ligaments, giving it a flexibility unlike any other animal, but we rarely see the real thing taking place on our own back decks.  I watched until the frog was completely gone, and although it must have been awful for the poor frog, it did not last terribly long.  And then the snake suddenly looked completely normal and thin again, as though it had this instantaneous metabolism, and went on its way, sated for a while.

Post-prandial constitutional

And here is a dear little frog that has thus far escaped being eaten by a snake.

And while I was searching for the photograph, I came across this picture of my dad on his last visit to our house.  I took him on several little adventures, just he and I, and one of them was on a river boat, the Essex River Queen, which goes from Essex all the way through the meanders until the river mouth mingles with the Atlantic Ocean. They gave everyone a free postcard at the end, and he told me excitedly that he would send his postcard to his sister Margaret in England, telling her of the wonderful trip!  I agreed that that was a lovely idea, not mentioning that his sister Margaret had been dead for years.

The old man and the river.

My father had quite bad dementia by then, as my mother had been the one keeping him together, preserving his sanity, but she had died earlier that year and his mind, which had been slowly unraveling, began to come completely undone.

My brother flew with him from England where he had been staying, and remained for a week, but then he flew back to the UK while my dad stayed on another week.  My father then had to fly back all by himself, which must have been rather nightmarish for the cabin crew.  As it was, he finally came through the Arrivals gates at Heathrow where my brother was waiting for him, and was delighted to see someone he recognised!  His son was there!  But he had forgotten to collect his luggage from the baggage retrieval system!   

He loved everything we did while he was here, loved all the attention I lavished on him because I knew that this was probably his last holiday with me.  He enjoyed it all with the great energy for life which he had always had.  He would try new foods like sushi with my brother and I, having never had it before, or so he said, and so it felt like to him. 

It is an awful thing, to watch your parent go a bit crazy, and then very batty indeed.  It was tragic, because he was always the most dignified and competent of people, and then suddenly to lose all that, and end up on stranger's doorsteps not knowing where he lived.

I miss him terribly, because even though I didn't live in the same city as him for most of my adult life, he was always there for me, for all three of his adored children.  He loved us with a boundless love which did not extend to anyone else, besides my mother.  We were the perfect ones, his darlings.  He was our strong and steadfast rock. 

When I was about twelve I found a litter of newborn kittens which had been dumped and left to die.  They were all dead except for one, this huge life-force pushing the blind, wet little thing to try to crawl, dragging its umbilical cord.  I wrapped it in my long-sleeve and rushed home where my dad showed me how to feed it with a dropper, and helped me to raise her.  She was the sweetest little cat, and was addicted to food, probably because she had suffered that early trauma, so she became rather round, but always stayed small, and her name was Little Fat Cat.  My father and I adored her, and she was a source of love for the whole family, happily sitting on laps and just the dearest little cat personality.  When she was still young, three or four, she was diagnosed with an eosinophilic ulcer which is usually a death sentence.  My dad paid so much money for an operation to save her, and we both nursed her back to health, where she remained for a while, but about six months later the rodent ulcer returned, and we had to put her down.  We drove home very quietly, and I saw tears drip down my big strong dad's face, as tears run down mine now, remembering him.