Author Archives: Kathleen Fox

Last week—shades of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor—I spotted a cottontail in my garden. “Garden” may be too formal a name for three tomato plants, some persistent grass, a little clover, way too much creeping Jenny, and at least one thistle. I could certainly understand how such a model of flourishing horticulture might appeal to a cottontail. What I couldn’t understand was how the furry little invader got in there.

The garden is in a raised circular bed that’s about 18 inches high, with a woven wire fence on top of that and a wire screen over the whole thing. I couldn’t see any rabbit-sized gaps in the fence or any signs of digging underneath it. My best guess was that the rabbit must have hopped in the day before while I was watering the tomatoes and had left the gate open for a while. I opened the gate, shooed it out, and figured the incident was closed—at least as long as the gate was closed.

But two days later, there was the rabbit again, hiding behind a tomato plant, nose twitching, the perfect picture of long-eared innocence. This time I knew the gate had been shut. When I approached the fence, the bunny didn’t wait for me to open the gate, but headed in the opposite direction. It got to the fence, slowed down slightly, and hopped right through.

For anyone who cares to know, I have now established, through actual observation and measurement, that a cottontail can slip through an opening two inches wide by four inches high. When I bought the fence, I was thinking about deer, not rabbits. The solution, I decided, was to get some light woven wire with a smaller mesh and put a row of it around the bottom of the fence. Good idea. I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Last evening, when I watered the tomato plants, I decided it was past time to do a little weeding. I put my gloves on and pulled the thistle. I took a hoe to the grass and the clover. I pulled some of the creeping Jenny, which is a futile endeavor, but at least I could say I was trying.

Underneath one side of the largest tomato plant was a pile of dried grass and weeds, left over from the last time I got ambitious enough to weed the garden. I picked up a handful of it and tossed it over the fence. The second handful contained some bits of soft gray fur.

When I picked up the third handful, there they were—five or six baby cottontails, snuggled together in the nest their mother had hollowed out and covered with the leavings from my weeding. I was startled to see them. I’m sure they were more than startled to see me. It must be terrifying to have the roof ripped off your house to reveal a giant, menacing creature crouched over your bed. Frightened as they must have been, though, they held true to their instincts and training and didn’t move. I just had a glimpse of bright eyes and twitching noses before I dropped the grass back over them.

Now I was faced with a moral dilemma. The immediate question was whether to go ahead and water the bunny-harboring tomato plant. Yes, I decided. The nest was under one side of the plant but not inside the basin I had dug around it to hold in water. If mama bunny had chosen to build her house on the edge of a lake, it wasn’t my problem if her basement occasionally flooded.

The bigger dilemma was what to do about the nest. Rabbits are pests. Rabbits, or so I presume, eat tomatoes. Peter notwithstanding, rabbits don’t belong in gardens. Mr. McGregor and I are quite in agreement about that.

Yet, in the instant I decided, without any thought, to cover up the baby cottontails again instead of getting rid of them, they somehow became my rabbits. Maybe because they were so cute. Maybe because they were so vulnerable, lying still in the nest with their hearts thumping and their ears flattened back. Maybe just because they were babies.

Or maybe because of my respect for their mother’s wisdom in choosing the site for her nest. She found the perfect spot, safe from foxes, dogs, cats, and hawks—from almost any predators, in fact, except me. Judging from the height and quantity of the weeds, she probably figured I didn’t spend enough time in the garden to pose much of a threat.

I have to admit she was right. For now, my garden consists of three tomato plants, some half-hoed grass, a little clover, still too much creeping Jenny, no thistles, five or six baby bunnies, and one quick and clever mother cottontail. I can always rabbit-proof the fence after the babies grow up and leave home. It’s a decision I may regret if I find bunny bite marks in half my tomatoes. On the other hand, if they promise to eat the creeping Jenny instead of the tomatoes, we might even negotiate a long-term lease.

Mr. McGregor would be ashamed of me, but I don’t care.

I bought some new shampoo last week. As I put it away in the bathroom, I noticed this reassuring sentence printed on the bottle: “This product was not tested on animals.” How nice to know I can enjoy a guilt-free shower, secure in the knowledge that no innocents have been harmed in order to help me face the day with squeaky-clean, shiny tresses.

But not all cosmetic companies are so humane. Just imagine the trauma for all the poor beasts who have been victimized by these heartless corporations—forced to endure trials of shampoos, styling gels, hair sprays, lotions, and countless other beauty products.

The following case histories are taken from interviews with a few of the hapless victims. (While the species are real, the names have been changed in order to protect the innocent.)

Toinette, Miniature Poodle. “Mon Dieu, what an ordeal! ‘Conditioner,’ they called it. May a peasant with the hands of a blacksmith ‘condition’ them—the barbarians! What their uncivilized potion did to my beautiful curls was a crime. The frizz! The tangles! One could scarcely endure to be combed. And then, as if such pain were not suffering enough, I was taken—oh, almost I cannot bear to speak it!—I was taken Out In Public. Forced to walk in the park among my friends and acquaintances. Oh, I held my head high. I pretended not to care. But I heard, you understand. The whispers. The stifled laughter behind my back. The humiliation! The shame! Still, to this day, I have the nightmares.”

Attila, Rottweiler. “I don’t talk about it much, see. Guys like me, we don’t. But what they used on me was baby shampoo. Left my coat all soft and fluffy, like a pup that hadn’t been groomed proper. Ruined that sleek, menacing look that us tough guys need. Made me look about as intimidating as a Cocker Spaniel. And the smell? “Lavender and Lilac,” they said it was. Disgusting stuff. Lost my night watchman job over it, I did. Anybody tries to get near me with anything like that again, he’s gonna lose an arm.”

Scheherazade, Pekingese. “Hellooo?! Did somebody really think the magenta styling gel and the spiked hair was my kind of fashion statement? I’m a lap dog, for crying out loud! I need people to see me as cute, cuddly, and in need of pampering and treats. Sure, sure, I know I’m really an egotistical little tyrant, but for cripes’ sake give me credit for being smart enough not to want to look like one! What’s next? Nose piercing?”

These interviewees, like many others, managed to escape their torment. They are now living safely at secret, cosmetic-free refuges, where they receive counseling from animal psychologists and are encouraged to participate in weekly support groups.

Other potential victims, stronger or blessed by Mother Nature with better natural weaponry, manage to fight back on their own. Like Anonymous, a Crocodile, who was interviewed from a circumspect distance. “Body lotion? Keep that greasy glop with its Gawd-awful smell away from my hide. I’m a croc, okay? My skin is like leather. Get over it.”

He added with a grin, “Of course, if you want me to taste the stuff, that’s different. Just smear some on your arm and let me at it.”

I am the only one in my immediate family with an actual, genuine, paid-for college degree in art. (Never mind that said degree came from a college smaller than many high schools, with an art department consisting of two people, only one of whom was a competent teacher. There’s still a valid signature on my diploma.)

Despite this official testimonial to my possessing a minimum of creative skill, I am the only one in my family who doesn’t currently “do” art or crafts. My mother quilts. My father is a capable woodworker and has a gift for cartooning. My sisters quilt, sew, make greeting cards, embroider, knit, crochet, and decorate their houses in attractive and innovative ways. All of them produce beautiful things that apparently turn out just the way they are supposed to.

When I try something of the sort, I usually get halfway through and realize, a), this is more work than I thought it was going to be, and b), what I’m creating bears only the slightest resemblance to the picture on the pattern. At which point my tendency is to give up and go read a book.

I may, however, have just discovered a craft that is truly suited to my talents. One of my sisters has been making bags and hats that are “felted.” The technique for this is to knit something out of wool yarn, making it significantly larger than the desired size. Then you wash it in hot water, toss it in the dryer, and shrink it to the size you want.

Now that just might be a skill I could master. I do have experience along those lines. There was the prom dress from high school that, as a college student with no money for dry-cleaning, I washed carefully by hand. The process transformed it from a full-length dress into a mini, which would have been okay if it hadn’t gone from a size 8 to a size 0 at the same time.

Then there was the nice green sweater of my ex-husband’s that I washed and—forgetting it was wool—tossed in the dryer. By the time I took it out, it just fit our son. He was four. Handing down clothes is a time-honored tradition, to be sure, though it is customary to wait for the smaller person to grow into things rather than adjust the clothes to fit. Oh, well, at least it gave the kid something green to wear for St. Patrick’s Day. Never mind that he said it itched.

Over the years I haven’t practiced this skill consistently. Still, I haven’t completely lost my touch. My most recent attempt at “felting” was my partner’s thick terry-cloth bathrobe. It wasn’t quite dry when I took it out of the dryer. Considerately not wanting him to have a damp bathrobe in the morning—it was January, after all—I tossed it back into the dryer for a little more time. When I took it out the second time, it was dry, all right. It also was six inches shorter than it had been and considerably narrower across the shoulders. Perhaps I could have kept it for myself, but I prefer my winter bathrobes to have sleeves that come down past my elbows. After I made a trip to the mall for a new bathrobe, we gave the old one to the thrift store, where it probably found a new owner who was a skinny eight-year-old.

With all this experience, felting might be just my thing. It probably would be best to start with a simple bag, though. No matter what size it turned out to be, I could pretend it was exactly the size I had intended. “I know the pattern called it a purse, but I really needed a little bag for my paper clips.”

Or maybe I could save all the time and effort and just go read another book.

With gas prices well over $3.00 a gallon and apparently settled in at that level for the duration, we’re seeing more and more magazine and newspaper articles about sources of alternative energy. One that always comes up in western South Dakota is wind power.

Wind is something we always have plenty of. As I write this, I can hear the musical jangling of the wind chimes hanging just outside my window—a frequent sound even in the sheltered valley where the house sits. Further out on the prairie, wind is a constant.

I used to think the Rapid City airport was the windiest place I’d ever been, until I experienced the wind at the airport in Rock Springs, Wyoming. I remember landing in a small plane at Rock Springs one July afternoon. As usual, the controller in the tower announced the weather conditions. He gave us the temperature and altitude, then—after a pause—the wind conditions. We could hear the surprise in his voice as he said, “Dead calm.” He had to repeat it, apparently to convince himself that it was true, perhaps because he had never had occasion to say it before. “Dead calm.” Lacking the expected wind to brace ourselves against, we almost fell over when we got out of the plane.

The prairies of western South Dakota are a lot like that. Your cowboy hat had better fit well, and you’d better pull it down tight, or your last glimpse of it will be a puff of dust as it touches down briefly on its way to Nebraska, Wyoming, or North Dakota.

So a recent dinner-table conversation among friends that started with high gas prices inevitably made its way to wind power. As we discussed wind farms, with their rows of massive windmills, someone mentioned that those huge vanes are seen by some as a threat to passing birds.

One of the men at the table, an engineer with that profession’s practical turn of mind, didn’t see potential bird-kill as a problem. He pointed out that you could simply supplement your wind farm income with a second business—selling snacks of wild bird meat. Western South Dakota buffalo wings, as it were. If the windmill vanes were set just right, the killing, cleaning, and cutting up might even be done in one fell swoop.

Of course, we’re talking about robins, doves, and meadowlarks, with only occasional hawks or eagles, so it would take a lot of wings to make up a serving. Perhaps a better approach would be to specialize in breast meat, maybe prepared in a smoker as my father does with dove breasts during hunting season every fall. They’re tasty little tidbits that certainly could appeal to the public. Advertising would have to be done somewhat carefully, of course. “White meat” is a little vague and not necessarily an accurate description. “Smoked meadowlark breast” just doesn’t have the necessary flair. Offering an all-you-can-eat “breast feed” might lead to embarrassing misunderstandings.

Perhaps it might be best just to call them “wings,” regardless of the exact parts of the birds offered for consumption. The public wouldn’t care. They’d be sure to flock in for a taste. That’s because they’d be irresistibly drawn in by the name of the business: “The Wings Beneath my Wind.”

Years ago my father discovered a unique strategy for keeping children quiet. He took four little girls along to a livestock auction. After he explained to them that gestures such as nodding or waving were ways that buyers signaled their bids to the auctioneer, they sat through the sale like little statues, hardly even daring to scratch their noses for fear of inadvertently buying a roping horse or 50 head of bred heifers.

To give credit where credit is due—and to prevent snide comments from my two younger sisters and two of my cousins—I must admit that all four of those little girls were the kind of children who would have sat quietly and behaved themselves anyway. Still, you have to admit it makes a better story this way.

It was a story I thought about several times this past Sunday. The occasion was an auction where my parents were selling some of their belongs as part of the process of moving to a smaller house. Their stuff was secondary, though. First the auctioneers had to dispose of the estate of a woman who had been a schoolteacher for years and who apparently had saved everything. Her furniture lined two sides of the old school gym. Laid out on rows of tables were old school books, dishes, Valentines from long-ago students, scrapbooks, shoes, costume jewelry, feather beds, kitchen gadgets, knickknacks, clothes, and hats.

Some of the stuff was probably junk. Some of it, to judge by the bidding, was collectible if not precisely antique. Some of it, like the magnificent old oak table with six or seven leaves, was obviously valuable. All of it in one place was overwhelming. It felt almost disrespectful, as if this woman’s life had been laid out on display without her having had a chance to choose what she wanted to reveal. One tour through all the tables, and I was ready to go home and clean out all my closets.

Not planning on buying anything, I hadn’t bothered to get a bidder’s number. I sat on the bleachers in the school gym and watched instead, wondering from time to time about the fuzzy line that separates “clutter” from “collectible.” At what point, exactly, does an old item become sufficiently aged to have evolved from junk to quaint keepsake? Two days after you toss it in the trash, probably.

In between pondering such weighty questions, I entertained myself by watching the sale. Auctioneering, I decided, requires a great deal of skill besides just the ability to rattle off numbers faster than the average person can listen to them. Conducting an auction is a bit like baby-sitting toddlers or herding buffalo—you have to be able to anticipate what they want to do next, just in time to tell them to do it. Is the crowd getting tired of dishes and knick-knacks? Go sell a couple pieces of furniture. Some odd item isn’t selling? Combine it with several other odd items until you find one that appeals to somebody. Have a collection of hats to get rid of? Model them, and do a little soft-shoe while you’re at it.

The bidders provided their share of entertainment, as well. There were several dealers, who scribbled in little notebooks, kept leaping up off the benches to go take closer looks at the upcoming items, and bid mostly against each other for the Depression glass and the old toys. There were the focused buyers waiting around for the one or two things they were interested in. There were the young couples hoping to get some inexpensive furniture or dishes. There were the onlookers who just stopped by to see what was going on and maybe get a piece of homemade pie from the lunch stand.

And there were my two younger sisters, who have learned something about auctions since that long-ago trip to the sale barn. Quite purposefully, they nodded or waved their way into ownership of some antique dishes, an old metal box full of buttons, some vintage clothes, a post hole digger, and a pick ax.

I sat very still on the bleachers and was careful not to scratch my nose.

Going from plant to plant this morning with my watering can, something struck me. No, it wasn’t a trailing branch of the lush begonia hanging in my office window. It was a thought. When did I become a person whose house plants thrive?

I’ve always thought of myself as someone whose thumbs are more black than green. My history with outdoor gardening certainly supports that self-assessment. Somehow or other, I manage to produce a mediocre crop of tomatoes almost every year, but that’s about as green as it gets.

Years ago I got a freelance assignment writing copy for the Gurney company’s seed and garden catalogs. When I told my mother about it, she asked, “Did you tell them that your house plants always die?” Of course not. I wanted the job. So for two months I unblushingly wrote descriptions of super-sweet strawberries and burpless cucumbers, then went home to my scraggly Christmas cactus and scrawny philodendron.

(The Christmas cactus, by the way, wasn’t my fault. For several months I wondered why it seemed so limp and was so flat instead of growing upward from the pot. Then one afternoon I discovered the cat sleeping in it.)

But that was a long time ago. Now a daughter of that same Christmas cactus reaches proud, glossy leaves out of its pot. The two African violets in my east office window bloom constantly. The begonia hanging above them needs trimmed back pretty soon if I want to be able to get any light from the window. The two big plants near the front door produce new leaves almost daily. The something-or-other that was a couple of wilted stalks in a plastic bag when a friend gave it to me is now a thriving bush on the kitchen floor.

There are plants all over the place. I don’t even know what kind most of them are. I just water them more or less regularly, turn them every so often so they don’t lean sideways, and fertilize them once a year or so whether they need it or not. And they grow. I don’t understand it; I just enjoy it.

Maybe my aura has changed over the years. Maybe it’s the water. Or maybe, given enough time and a little luck, even black thumbs can begin to turn green. Who knows? Maybe, in a few more years, this remarkable transformation will even move outside and touch my tomato plants.

As a change of pace this week, here is a recipe. It comes from my friend Maureen. As I generally do with recipes, however, I have added a few embellishments.

“Earthquake Cake” is a creation sure to add drama as well as good taste to your next social occasion. Here’s how you make one:

1. Mix up a chocolate cake according to your favorite recipe. (What, you expected me to give you ingredients and step-by-step instructions? Why do you think you have all those cookbooks in your cupboard? Go look it up.)

2. Bake cake according to recipe directions.

3. Remove cake from oven, using only one hand because you couldn’t find the second oven mitt.

4. Drop hot cake onto kitchen floor. If you use the correct wrist action as you perform this step, the cake will land right side up. Approximately half of it will bounce into the air, turn over, and land back in the pan upside down.

5. Say, with feeling, several words appropriate to the occasion.

6. Take the 15 seconds you should have spent in the first place to find the missing oven mitt, which is right in the drawer where it belongs. Pick cake up off the floor and place it on a cooling rack on the counter.

7. Notice dent in vinyl kitchen floor. Say several more appropriate words.

8. Study surface of the cake. The half that is still in its original position has developed an interesting pattern of earthquake-like cracks across its surface. The half that is upside down is uneven and bears a certain resemblance to the Badlands of South Dakota. Frosting might help, but only if you applied it at least an inch thick.

9. Take container of whipped topping out of the freezer.

10. Serve cake to friends that evening. Explain how it acquired its unique topographical surface. Assure them that only the pan, not the cake itself, actually touched the floor. Because they are your friends, because they trust you—and, above all, because they want cake—they will pretend to believe you.

11. Cover cake generously with whipped topping. Eat. Enjoy.

12. Join friends in thinking up creative names for this groundbreaking concoction: "Earthquake Cake," “Jumble Cake, “Almost Upside Down Cake,” “Bake and Shake Cake,” “Fallen Angel Cake.” Laugh. Enjoy.

Friends don’t let friends cry over spilled cake.