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.