A Minnesota spring

Yesterday I was walking my dog, Brigit, on almost-dry and clear sidewalks, today everything looks like this! Such is a Minnesota spring. I can't really say that I mind, it's so pretty and it'll be gone in a few days. I went out with my camera after walking the dog and took a few more pictures, which are posted on my Flickr page.

City sidewalks

When I was a kid growing up in the St. Paul, Minn., suburb of Roseville, I used to stay overnight at my cousins' house in Minneapolis on Thanksgiving weekend. They lived on Penn Ave. S., near Minnehaha Creek, in a modest but nice neighborhood. I recall being particularly impressed by the fact that they had sidewalks.

In Roseville, if you went for a walk, you strode down the middle of the street; but in the city, there was this marvelous paved way just for pedestrians. It was so nice to walk with my cousins to a little store only a couple of blocks away and not have to worry about cars en route.

It was so civilized.

I now live in Minneapolis, and sidewalks are still one of the reasons I like living in the city. But lately I have found myself walking in the street more often than not when I take my dog for her daily stroll; the sidewalks have been treacherous, as small patches camouflage themselves among the shallow puddles and wet pavement.

I am not a perambulator; I prefer to walk somewhat briskly. I engage in these daily walks not only for the fresh air and to see and hear the crows, cardinals and woodpeckers that enliven my neighborhood, but also to raise my heart rate just enough and work up a bit of a sweat to burn off the fat I have accumulated over the years. So when I have to slow down to a careful crawl to avoid injury, I am more than a little dissatisfied with the whole experience.

The dog doesn't seem to mind; she has more time to sniff when we go slow. Conversely, she is not happy when I lead her out onto the rough but unslippery asphalt road, where there are no smells to engage her. I compromise on these occasions and take her back onto the sidewalk whenever I see a stretch that is dry. In fact, our route is pretty much determined by the condition of the sidewalk on any given block: Shall I turn or go straight? How does the sidewalk look this way compared with that?

My own 40 feet of city sidewalk is nearly always clear and dry. I have no qualms about sprinkling grass-killing deicing salts after shoveling to ensure that no slick spots remain behind. I do buy a product with minimal environmental impact, at least among those available at my local hardware store. But I am more concerned with safe sidewalks than with keeping the grass healthy. It's easy enough to reseed it in the spring.

And I am looking forward to more of spring and less of this not-quite-spring-not-quite-winter that plagues my daily walks with uncertainty. I enjoy the kind of surprise that involves sighting an unexpected migrant bird passing through the neighborhood, but not the sort that has me finding myself suddenly sprawled on the pavement.

Winter biking

When you ride your bike in winter, people think you’re a lot tougher than you really are. They don’t realize that you get warm from the exertion: as long as you’re dressed for the cold, your ears are covered and you have good gloves, it’s really not so bad. Though I’ll admit that when the air temperature is in the teens and below, it stabs at my fingertips no matter what gloves or mittens I wear. And when it dips below zero, that’s enough for me to leave the bicycle in the garage.

But I keep finding that I miss my daily bike rides when I don’t get out. Like today, for example, we had a new snowfall, and I have deadlines that make me feel pressed for time. So I got in the car and drove to a different coffee shop in my old neighborhood --because I still needed to get away from the distractions I encounter at home with two teenagers, three cats and a dog, to finish reading a book from which I am taking notes for something I am writing for my quarterly magazine.

I went to the other coffee shop not only because I also like that one, but because I just can’t justify driving the short distance to my local spot. If I’m going to drive, I must go somewhere farther! Now I’m hoping the streets will clear themselves well enough for me to venture out tomorrow -- I especially hate going two days in a row without riding my bike.

It’s not that I’m trying to prove something, it’s just that this coldest winter in seven years has also seemed to me one of the sunniest, and that persistent bright sunshine keeps drawing me out in the afternoons. That and the fact that my home office is located in the basement, with a small north-facing window above my head. Through it I can see the sunshine on my neighbor’s fence and it makes me think about the big south-facing windows at my neighborhood coffee shop -- not to mention its convivial air and the baristas who prepare my latte when they see me rolling up on my bicycle (until I decided to switch to green tea, causing some confusion for a time), and the other regulars whom I enjoy seeing and visiting with.

Sometimes I will encounter other winter bicyclists and we would greet each other as though we were members of the same club, even though we had never met before. I have exchanged winter bicycling tips and routes with some of these, as well as the general comeraderie of people who share the same eccentric pursuits.

At one point I had noticed that my bike was getting harder to pedal, and I wondered if the tires were somehow more sluggish in winter. Then, after a fellow I had talked with about winter bicycling had mentioned the need to clean the gears off, I inspected mine and found them perfectly packed with dirty snow and sand. On a mild day, I rinsed them off with warm water and then re-oiled the chain. It operated so smoothly after that, I almost felt it was too easy!

However, the spilled water at the bottom of the garage flowed under the door, and when the temperature dropped precipitously that night, I found the garage door frozen shut and couldn’t get my bike out for several days! It was, in fact, really too cold for bike riding that week, and at the end of the week I persuaded my teenage son to get the door open for me and soon I was back in business.

Now it is March, sometimes the snowiest month in Minnesota, so who knows how much bicycling I’ll be able to do. But soon enough it will all melt away. I’m looking forward to easier, longer bike rides this spring!

Kitty gets down from the tree

Ever notice how much cats enjoy looking down on you from above?

We don't let our cats roam, and this one tolerates a harness and leash well, so he gets to be outside the most. But we still have to check on him pretty often, and here's why:

Not a good idea, Kitty. . . .

Whew! He doesn't always make it this far!

November Raspberries

In the corner of the backyard of the little house we rent in South Minneapolis's Nokomis area, there is a little patch of raspberries that bore a pretty good crop back in June, but their real bounty has been this fall. It's not that they've yielded incredible amounts of rasperries, but I've been able to pick enough for my bowl of cereal on about two or three mornings a week from mid September until now, the second of November. I'm sure this is unprecedented, and it's such a treat.

On an average morning, I take the dog for a walk of from one half to one mile or so around the neighborhood, then when we come back I am quite warm, even on chilly mornings with temperatures in the 40s, so I fill my bowl with cereal and head out to the corner of the yard to add raspberries. I always pick a few extras and give them to the dog -- she is very dainty when she takes them from me, barely even touching my fingers. Then I pour the milk into my bowl and eat my cereal outdoors. Each morning that I do this I think it may be the last until spring, and that makes it even more delightful.

Learning to Detour

An interesting thing has happened here in Minneapolis since the bridge collapsed. Instead of worsened gridlock and rising tensions as people cope with finding their way around a major artery, most of us are actually rising to the challenge of having to switch out of automatic pilot and think through how to get where we need to go.

I had been thinking about this some recently when our local paper, the Star Tribune, published an article about this very phenomena, "Adaptable drivers avert expected gridlock."

Recently I headed out to run an errand to Northeast Minneapolis, a destination that would normally be a quick hop via 35W and over the ex-bridge; then remembered as I left the house that I wouldn't be able to take that route, and so started constructing maps in my head, recalling which roads connected to what, which ones had bridges over the river and so on. I realized even as I was doing this that I was making my brain work a whole lot more than it normally does when running simple errands. And I couldn't help but think, this has got to be a good thing, for a number of reasons:

• We're so much less likely to respond irrationally to inconvenience when the inconvenience is anticipated and planned for.
• When our brains are engaged in rational problem solving we aren't distracted by emotional stressors so much -- the bad kind of stress that raises blood pressure. I do experience a kind of stress when I am figuring out my route as I go, but it's more comparable to the stress of solving a puzzle or engaging in vigorous excercise -- it's stimulating in a way that feels good and beneficial.
• All this mental excercise has got to be good for our brain health -- I actually wonder if it will manifest years down the road in a reduced incidence of Alzheimer's! OK, that's a stretch, but it would probably be a good idea to alter our routes to familiar destinations anyway. My father used to tell me you should vary your route home from work because most accidents happen close to home because people become less attentive the more familiar their surroundings. By taking alternative routes to familiar destinations, we become more mindful of our surroundings and so more alert and likely to avoid accidents. I haven't read anything about whether the bridge collapse has had any effect on the number of auto accidents in Minneapolis, however.

In the Star Tribune article, they lead with the example of a woman who tested out various alternate routes to work, adjusted her work schedule, and generally demonstrated a very rational scientific approach to the new inconvenience. I just find it really encouraging to see evidence that human nature may actually be more rational than we sometimes think!

Mushrooms on a stick

After two months of a drought and a heat wave here in the Twin Cities (and elsewhere, I know), we got hit by rain, rain, and more rain in August. And suddenly all these mushrooms are sprouting up in people's yards everywhere. I often get mushrooms in my yard because I use a lot of woodchips for mulch and they must be filled with spores, but lately I've seen mushrooms everywhere, including in grassy lawns. I headed out yesterday morning with my camera to get some pictures, and it being a sunny, dry day, I didn't find very many mushrooms anymore, but then these funny-looking ones showed up on the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street (we call it the "boulevard" in Minneapolis).

After taking these pictures, I went to the library and got a mushroom field guide, and I also looked on the Web, but I haven't found anything that looks quite like these. Maybe they're a variation on something that usually has a more traditional dome-like cap. But I get such a kick out of these with their perfectly sperical balls on such a long stem.

It's Minnesota State Fair time, and the fair is especially known for offering things on a stick (mostly food, but others have used the concept for marketing other things -- like the art institute handed out images of art from their collection, printed on cardstock and glued onto a flat stick, and called it art on a stick). So I just can't help but noticing how much these look like something you might see at the fair.

Minneapolis Bridges Still Standing

The historic Stone Arch Bridge, in the background of the first photo and shown again in the second, was built in 1883 and carried freight trains over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis for almost 100 years, until 1978. The late I-35W bridge that now litters the river was built just 40 years ago.

It seems to me that not only are the old-style bridges like these (Hennepin Ave., Central Ave. and Stone Arch) with their arches and/or suspension cables sturdier than the long slender unsupported span of the freeway bridge that was, but far more aesthetic as well. They just don't build bridges like they used to. Or maybe they just don't take care of them like they used to.

Many of us here in Minnesota are now in that angry after-event phase of looking around for someone to blame. It's tempting to point fingers at our no-new-taxes governor, Tim Pawlenty, for his stinginess when it comes to the state's infrastructure, as well as other things. But local blogger Rich Broderick makes a strong argument on the Twin Cities Daily Planet that the neglect of our infrastructure is a nationwide problem that goes back much further than that. Who wants to spend taxpayer money on boring things like taking care of bridges and highways when there are wars to be fought and tax cuts to dish out?

It reminds me of the time years ago when one of my girlfriends moved out to her own apartment for the first time and whined about having to spend her money on boring things like toothpaste. She, however, figured it out before she had to spend much more on even more boring things like dental work.

But the question remains, will American voters and the politicians who court us figure it out before another tragedy strikes?

Sweet Lindens

While riding my bike in the neighborhood recently, I noticed a strong sweet perfume in the air and began to look around for the source. It was well past time for lilacs or flowering crab trees, so I was peering into the gardens nearby and finding nothing to explain the luscious fragrance that seemed to be everywhere around me. Then I noticed that I was on a street lined with linden trees, and they were blooming. Linden blossoms are wonderfully fragrant, and because they bloom in late June when the leaves are fully out, and they are somewhat small (less than a half inch across) and yellow, they tend to blend in with the leaves until you look right at them, so I always smell them before I see them.

In Minneapolis, the forestry department has adopted a plan of planting a given street all with one type of tree, but varying the trees from one street to the next. In this way they preserve the urban aesthetic of orderly symmetry and repetition while at the same time following the sound horticultural policy of diversity so we don't have all our trees wiped out by a single disease, as has happened in many places with Dutch elm disease.

The linden tree used in street planting is the European little-leaf linden, or Tilia cordata, a close relative of the American basswood, Tilia americana. At our previous house we had a basswood tree, and I discovered that it bloomed about one to two weeks later than T. cordata and, unfortunately, this particular basswood was somewhat shaded on its lower branches, so the flowers tended to be held up high in the tree where they were harder to see. I don't think they were as fragrant as T. cordata, either, but it may just have been because the blossoms were not as abundant or as close as the street trees.

This photo was taken just yesterday and the blossoms are a bit faded already. There were other branches with more flowers than this, but it has been so windy lately that it was hard to get a photo that wasn't blurry!

A Home for My Tomatoes

When we moved last fall, I dug up a few shrubs that were likely to suffer from neglect with no one to care for them, and planted them as soon as I could upon moving. Getting those shrubs settled in where their roots could knit themselves into the ground took precedence over unpacking our many books and other things, such are the priorities of a gardener.

I also took careful measurements of the yard, drew up the outline, observed and noted as best I could where the overhanging tree branches would be casting their shadows come June, and set it all aside for one of my favorite winter pastimes: garden planning.

Except I never did the planning. It wasn’t really that I was too busy, though I told myself as much, it was more like I just wasn’t inspired to do it. The lay of the land, so to speak, wasn’t yet familiar to me.

So this spring, when my husband asked where we were going to plant tomatoes and beans — the two vegetables we must plant every summer, if nothing else — I pointed without conviction to the corner of the backyard that I had figured would have the most sun, and we paced out the spots where a couple of raised postage-stamp beds (four-foot square) could go, and he said, OK, we’ll get the lumber on the weekend and I’ll make the frames.

But I wasn’t wholly at ease with the plan. The spot seemed aesthetically awkward — the two garden boxes couldn’t be tucked into the corner because that’s where raspberries grew — and I wasn’t sure it would really get enough sun, and it seemed to be just within reach of the dog when out on her leash.

It was a few days later that I had the aha! moment that got me over my gardening hump. I was standing in the backyard, appreciating the ample shade from the mature, sprawling Norway maple that had finally opened its leaves and covered most of the yard in its soothing shade, and facing the front yard as I pondered our gardening prospects.

And then I noticed the south side of the house awash in sunlight.

I eyed that space, and I realized that the declination of the summer sun, plus the modest height of our neighbor’s house to the south, plus reflected heat and light from the stucco walls of our house equaled the best conditions for heat-loving tomato plants that I’ve had in many years.

And suddenly I felt very much at home, knowing where I would plant my tomatoes.

(I wrote this for my editor’s column in my little journal, Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, or MOQ. To learn more about MOQ, including how to subscribe, please go here.)

A walk in the wildflower garden

My husband and I enjoyed a visit to the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden on Saturday. They were celebrating the 100th anniversary of the garden, founded by botanist extraordinaire Eloise Butler back in 1907, right in Minneapolis's North Side, in the middle of Theodore Wirth Park.

We watched as a costumed interpreter portrayed famed botanist and plant namer Carl Linneaus, followed by a brief ritual tree planting by our mayor and some park board people. Then we skirted around the small crowd and went for a leisurely stroll through the garden, stopping to admire this beautiful blue hepatica as well as several other spring ephemeral wildflowers along the way. (For more wildflower photos, see my Flickr page)

We sat awhile on a bench in the shade (it was a very warm day), and listened to a cardinal calling repeatedly from on high; a little girl talking excitedly to her mother about something she had sited, "I have eagle eyes, I can see 'em"; the trill of a red-winged blackbird in a nearby wetland just outside the garden; the distant, faint hum of traffic, reminding us that we have not left the city; and two women talking, seemingly oblivious to the tranquility all around them -- one was nodding and murmuring in an understanding kind of way as the other said, "so I said, 'fine, do this other thing, I'll support you, but I don't think it's a party, it's hard.' " We also heard other bird sounds that I could not identify.

All in all, a lovely couple of hours.

Forsooth! Forsythia!

Pardon my typical Minnesotan obsession with the weather, especially when it's as lovely as this. And I'm so pleased my forsythia survived not only being transplanted last fall, but also an early April cold snap just as the buds had formed. I was afraid that it might have killed the blossoms, but as you can see, they are doing very well, thank you!

Of cabbages and eggs

eggs and red cabbage

I have tried using natural materials to dye Easter eggs in the past, but my kids recall better than I do that they didn't really turn out that well. They not only lacked the intense color of the artificial dyes, but they didn't have much color at all. However, I didn't feel like buying egg dye, and since my teenagers don't take much interest in doing these little holiday projects with me anyway, I figured I would just try again. Besides, I had already bought some red cabbage at the co-op, and I had a whole jar of turmeric, which I never use for anything.

So I got some directions from the Minnesota co-op Lakewinds Natural Foods and tried again. Noting that they recommend leaving the eggs in the dye in the fridge overnight, I did just that, limiting myself to two colors so I wouldn't have a fridge full of cups of spillable liquids. And I think they turned out pretty well!

eggs in turmeric

The first photo shows the eggs with red cabbage to produce a pretty robin's-egg blue, in the second photo they're sitting in water with about a tablespoon of turmeric powder. Both were mixed with boiling water and a tsp or so of white vinegar. I increased the amounts from the original recipe because I assumed it was for one egg in one cup of liquid.

The third photo shows you how the colors turned out.

Looking for spring

The weather has been mild here for some weeks, but noticeable signs of spring have been few, until now. I suppose their seeming sudden appearance has something to do with our several days of rain, which kept me from wandering outdoors and poking around for these tell-tale signs, so now it seems of a sudden that there are green buds and tulip tips and such. I am participating in a swap on Swap-bot called "Extreme Close-up Photo ATCs," the idea being to take close-up photos and then crop them down to ATC size. The fun of this swap has been that it has given me a little extra push to get out and look for things to photograph, and not the grand vistas or stunning but cliche'd sunsets, but to get up close and personal with my surroundings. So here are some of the photos I have been taking in anticipation of this swap.

The first one shows the tips of emerging tulips, which I planted last fall shortly after we moved into this house.

The next one is of forsythia buds. I dug up the forsythia and moved it with me, so it is a great relief to see such robust evidence that it survived its late autumn transplanting.

The third photo is of some primula blossoms, which are actually on a houseplant that I set out by the back door about a week ago to get it used to the outdoor conditions so I can transplant it into my garden. It seems to be liking it just fine out there!

Metaphorically yours

I haven’t tended to give much thought to the words I use to close an e-mail message, I usually just put my name with no closing. But I have begun to feel that’s really a little too breezy, that a closing of some sort is better than just a name, and so I’ve been pondering and experimenting some with different ways to close my messages.

I’ve long since rejected “sincerely,” “very truly yours” and other standard closings as having been rendered meaningless by custom, like buzz words. Once I noticed someone using “best regards” or simply “regards,” and I kind of liked that for a while -- it was new to me, even though I now realize it’s an old standard too, every bit as much as “sincerely.” So now I’ve come to see “regards” as too much of a stock phrase and too impersonal. If I want to be impersonal, I can continue to just close with my name.

Some people close with “peace,” some “hugs,” the latter having become increasingly common so that I have gone from finding it rather sweet to more ordinary. To me, at least. I have a Navajo friend who closes with “Hozho,” a wonderful word full of meanings too complex to easily translate into English. But I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable co-opting an expression from another culture.

I think part of my problem with most closings is that they are one-size-fits-all, so no matter what it is, when people say it to everyone they correspond with, it becomes impersonal, generic. Wouldn’t it be much more personal if we actually selected a closing that was tailored to the particular person we were corresponding with and the nature of our relationship with that person?

Then I got an e-mail with a closing that just made my day, and now I’m really thinking about better ways to close my messages.

I had been corresponding with a local poet who had given me permission to use one of his poems in my quarterly journal, MOQ (see link at right). I had been very finicky about finding just the right poem, struggled to explain what I was looking for (our slogan is “exploring the bucolic city”), and so had gone back and forth with him over a period of several weeks. He was incredibly patient and supportive through it all, and in the end assured me that he was “thrilled” that we would be printing one of his poems (we ended up using two). This from a guy who has been published in national poetry magazines, much much more prestigious than our little local journal. And we can't afford to pay a cent for the works we use, only contributor copies.

After the issue was published, I was very late in mailing him his contributor copies. He sent me an e-mail and, rather than complain about it, offered to pick them up if that was more convenient, assured me that he had “no worries,” and closed with “yours, all yours,” followed by his name.

WELL! Isn’t that a lovely way to close an e-mail message?

Of course, it would not be even remotely appropriate in most correspondence (and I would hate to see it rendered meaningless by overuse), but in the context of the working relationship we had developed over the last several weeks, and the fact that he knows my husband more than me (and he is happily married himself), and that he is a poet, after all, it actually seemed appropriate while at the same time incredibly romantic. But in a chivalric kind of way. Like a pledge of fealty or something.

And now it’s really got me thinking about how that little closing, usually just one or two words, presents an opportunity to make someone smile.

So I’m giving myself the creative challenge to come up with adverbs to pair with “yours” in closing my messages. Too often, I can think of nothing that doesn’t seem contrived or inappropriate, so I still resort to the name-only closing. I’ve thought about compiling a list of really creative, fun closings, and then keeping it by the computer so I can look at it for ideas; but selecting from a list of closings runs the risk of still being impersonal. My motivation is to make my correspondence both more interesting and more genuinely personal, and I fear that selecting from a list can easily become as impersonal as using the same one over and over again.

So for the time being, I am

Searchingly yours,
Sharon

A little pagan mystery, perhaps

Spring is emerging here in the frozen north of Minnesota, and so on Friday I went for a little walk to enjoy the warming sunshine. We have some great natural areas along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, and this particular spot at E. 36th St. and the West River Road has a little parking lot and then a vast expanse of trails, woods, and little pockets of prairie. It's a favorite area for birders as well as nature lovers of all sorts.

I was walking around looking for things to photograph for a Swap-bot "extreme close-ups" photo ATC. I thought I might find some tree bark with interesting patterns, or a patch of moss or something (there's not much green around here just yet). As I was walking, a man came from the parking lot and was heading down one of the hilly slopes when a voice from atop the hill in front of me called out "Catch me if you can!" The man, in his 50s, I'd guess, and sporting a long scraggly beard and hair like an aging hippy, quickened his pace and hurried on up the hill in front of me, just as I saw a woman of about the same age scamper quickly over the top.

A few moments later, when I reached the top of this hill , I saw the man and woman sitting together amicably in the sunshine at the edge of a large clearing, on a spot overlooking the river (since nothing has leafed out yet, there is a fine view of the river through the brush). Not wanting to intrude, I just walked around for a bit to see if there might be anything emerging for me to photograph, when I spotted this curious construction that looked like it had been put together maybe last year. Not far from it were some blackened chunks of wood as though someone had enjoyed a little campfire there. I don't know what to make of it, but I like to think someone was overcome with a mix of artistic and pagan impulses and just had to make this rustic shrine.

Paper doll bride and groom

Our good friend, Tim, got married last weekend and I made them these paper dolls using photos of the bride and groom. We have had a longtime running joke with Tim about Tim the Enchanter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so it was a no-brainer to use that theme for Tim's doll. But I hadn't met Kathy, so I figured the Queen of Hearts theme is a sure bet for a new bride!

They liked them, or at least Tim said they did (I hope the bride does too), although he thought they were puppets, which I suppose they could be.

A Valentine from Mother Nature

I went out earlier this winter to photograph a hedge with interesting scraggy branches that had been revealed when the leaves fell away, and while standing there, chanced to look up and saw this heart in the tree branches overhanging the street. Isn't it sweet to get a message like that from our mother? When I took just a few steps from where I was standing the image was gone. It was a magical moment. Happy Valentine's Day!

A belated happy Darwin Day

Charles Darwin's birthday is Feb. 12, and the international Darwin Day site would like to make a big deal of it, especially in a couple of years when it is (would be?) his 200th birthday, a year that is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species.. I think Darwin Day is a really cool idea but completely forgot about it this year. One year I was going to propose a homeschooler event, a Darwin Day potluck and science and art fair. I figured we could label the food we bring with the scientific names of the ingredients and also present art and science projects related to Darwin, biology, and/or evolution. But then I had this paranoia that some anti-Darwin types with an agenda would crash the party to present papers about creationism or whatever they call it now and decided I really didn't want to go there. So I wimped out. A completely unfounded fear, I might add, since my only experience of fellow homeschoolers at all ends of the political and religious spectrum has been one of mutual respect.

Anyway, here's a happy Darwin Day to you, just a little late. If you want to make some cool stickers of the image here, go to the Darwin has a Posse Web site at Swarthmore college. They even have a link to someone who is selling them readymade, so if you want a weather-resistant vinyl sticker for your car, you can buy one now!

Chamomile kitty

This is my cat Tres, so named because we already had two cats (still have them) when we got him, so he is cat number 3, or "tres" ("trace"). Here he is helping me with garden planning. He "helps" by pushing things off the table that he thinks I don't need, like pencils, for example.

Well, yesterday, Tres was not his usual pesky self. He slept all day (even more than usual for a cat!) and when Martin tried to pick him up Tres growled continuously; when Martin tried to sit and just offer him a lap, which he usually enjoys, Tres just continued to growl and grumble. Either he was hurting or he was very crabby.

So we figured Tres didn't feel well and decided to just leave him alone for a while. I felt his nose and it was cool and damp, so it didn't seem too worrysome. Then Nora checked him out (she once volunteered at a vet's office because she was going to be a vet). She said he must have an ear infection or something, one of his ears was quite hot, the other one was not.

That brought back memories of when my kids were little and we had to deal with earaches and the like, but instead of pumping them full of antibiotics and mess up their immune systems, I would study their symptoms and look it up on a chart in a book about homeopathy, give them the appropriate remedy, and they'd soon be on their merry way.

The "one hot ear, one cool ear" reminded me of the symptoms that would point to homeopathic chamomile -- only it would be one cheek red and hot, the other normal and cool. And the accompanying emotional symptom? Whiny crabbiness.

So I told Nora to give him chamomile tablets (little pellets), which she did, and later that evening he was pestering the other cats and making them mad. Aah, normalcy.