Month: April 2025

APRIL FADES

And is fading wherever you are. Six days left in the fourth month.

The mocking birds, grackle, jays, sparrows of assorted varieties, cardinals and a solitary woodpecker come to the backyard dangling flat feeder I’ve fill with mealworms which draws a busy winged frenzy like shoppers to a bazaar. The squirrels, those antic rodents with their spasmodic twirling, bounding motions and fluttering tails, pillage the other feeder, exhausting them, and me.

Out front in the carport, a feral gray cat now comes regularly to be fed. A seashell has been set among the plants on the steps to the slider. I found the seashell on a Gulf beach in the Panhandle. The cat kibble is set out in the shell, is now a feeder. It reminds me, and only me, of the shell in which the mythical maiden stands in Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus.”

The cat, looking a bit ragged these days, as if she might have tangled with a rival, showed no great appetite for her food this morning. Perhaps I should call her Venus. She departed.

The crows have their own feeder — of peanuts and, oddly enough, cat kibble, which they like. They have not shown up yet. I will hear them when they do.

So the cat did not partake of her feeder.

But a rat did — a small rat (one might even call it cute) briefly dined on the kibble.

And so the 7 a.m. traffic of birds, cats and rodents took it’s wild turn as the light rose on the fading April morning.

APRIL NIGHT

There was a black cat on the walk this mild April evening, fortelling the black, night. He was sitting in a driveway, staring at me mildly, eyes very bright, as a mild April evening became the April night, sealing off forever this mild April day.

And that’s all I’ll say, except how much the breeze flutters the little leaves above the ramshackled house on another block, where an old lady lives, all in darkness now, her hammock no longer slung across her little porch, and the tiny model sailboat set upon the sill of the window facing into the carport–that’s missing, too.

And the purple Club House flag, flapping in the breeze, is flying at half-staff, indicating a death in the community. Was it that old woman? I haven’t seen her lately. I hope she’s still with us.

But, if not, living or deceased, I choose to see her happily setting sail, as if that tiny model sailboat were the real thing, large as life –sailing her off forever across the April moon, borne by the mild April breeze into the April night.