MARY T. WAGNER
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Turning a "kitty corner"

4/27/2020

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There’s an old saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Folks say that all the time, as proof of the argument that past a certain age, people and animals don’t change. Well, that’s the thing with old sayings. Sometimes they’re true, sometimes they’re not…and sometimes they’re true until they get turned on their heads.

Meet Mookah, a striped Tabby cat with a famously prickly disposition, who has just demonstrated to myself, the dog, and herself as well, that it is never too late to make a change for the better.

As cats go, Mookah is thirteen years old and therefore “getting up in years.” I suppose you could say that she and I (rapidly approaching Medicare eligibility) and Lucky, my ten year old dog, are all in the same boat. We have long-standing habits, routines, and ways of doing things. Mookah has lived most of her life proving her reputation as being difficult, unfriendly, aloof, standoffish, prickly, thoroughly hostile to other cats, and generally very tightly wound.

You get the picture. She is also beautiful, with feral grey and brown and cream stripes, gorgeous green eyes, and a delicate, elegant figure. But her looks were never what anybody took away from a casual encounter. Bloody scratches, perhaps, or maybe a tooth mark if she took exception to how long you tentatively stroked her forehead in an effort to make friends.

Technically, Mookah has been my younger daughter’s cat since she was a wee kitten rescued from a shelter. However, as has been true with a few other family felines, there have been times that Mookah has moved into my house as a temporary arrangement.

The transitions have never been smooth or easy. Ferocious cat fights were common, and blood was occasionally spilled. She caused so much disruption while my house was for sale a few years ago that I finally “rehomed” her to a perky college student who was quite happy to pamper Mookah and worship her as an “only cat.”

The large empty nest eventually sold, and I moved to my present, smaller digs. And then, a year after I had weepily handed Mookah over to her new owner and driven away with tears streaming down my face, the college student reached out to me in a panic. She had moved to a new apartment, and only after moving discovered that her landlord would not allow a cat on the premises. Could I possibly take Mookah back?

What’s a “cat grandmother” to do? I said “yes,” of course. However, she was  not going to be an “only cat” at my house. Not only was there another cat on board—Smokey who was friendlier, cuddlier, more relaxed, constantly seeking physical contact and thoroughly adapted to lap sitting and tummy rubs—I still had my large dog, Lucky.

If I had thought that navigating several pet egos and tamping down bloodshed was difficult in a five-bedroom house with two floors, it was only going to get harder in a tiny duplex!!

The prevailing New World Order required that the house was effectively partitioned into two zones, with Lucky appointing himself as the “cat police” to enforce compliance. Smokey got the living room and my bedroom, where he curled up beside my pillow every night and purred. Mookah got the smaller bedroom where my daughter stayed when she was in town, and the small den at the back of the house.

Lucky kept a constant eye on the living room, enforcing the new rules. Mookah dared not take a step into the living room without being greeted at the doorway by a large canine staring her down as if to say “you shall not pass!”

Lucky is part Border Collie, by the way. He may not have a flock of sheep to boss around, but “herding cats” became second nature to him.

And so the uneasy peace was maintained, even though I occasionally woke to the sound of brief but furious fighting down the hall between gentle Smokey and Mookah, the hellion.

And then, unexpectedly, my beloved Smokey took ill and then died. I was bereft, shattered, in deep mourning for the loss of this pet who—while I had juggled crushing physical and emotional stress due to family emergencies—had embodied affection, love, patience, and serenity. It just wasn’t fair, I thought. Why couldn’t it have been Mookah who was taken instead?

Weeks passed, then months, and now it has been a year. I continued all the traditional ways I could think of and had long been doing to “make friends” with this prickly feline, and none seemed to be working. Despite the gourmet treats, the bursts of lavender-scented pheromone “calming” spray, the fluffy blankets and flannel on the bed to make her comfortable, she seemed as emotionally distant and guarded and selectively unfriendly as ever.

And Lucky, ever vigilant, continued his duties of keeping her confined to “her” half of the house, and barred her from the living room even though peace no longer demanded it. We lived very separate lives.

And then, during yet another of Mookah’s furtive, cautious attempts to expand her boundaries and enter the living room, I caught Lucky’s attention and motioned him with a stern look to stay just where he was. Mookah cautiously walked in a few feet more. Lucky looked from the cat back to me, and once again I told him not to move.

He sank to the floor reluctantly as Mookah tentatively crossed the room entirely and found a hiding place behind an overstuffed chair.

“Good boy!!” I told Lucky. And at last, unexpectedly, a truce had been born. Again and again in the coming days, Mookah would walk more confidently into the living room, and again and again I praised Lucky to the hilt for staying put instead of springing into “cat police” mode. It is our “new normal.”

This has been nothing short of transformational for us all.

Mookah now strides through the living room with confidence, arching and stretching on the large “cat tree” that had gone unused since Smokey’s passing. No longer threatened and challenged by Lucky’s constant vigilance, she spends hours curled up on the edge of the sofa, basking in the afternoon sunlight as it pours through the large window and regarding a world of birds, squirrels and other critters she had not been able to view before this.

Curled up in a warm ball on my daughter’s bed, she unfurls herself when I enter the room and presents her tummy for some scratching. Instead of swatting away my hand in irritation and causing me to reach for the antibiotic ointment if I scratch her ears too long, she now leans into the caress and purrs.

As for Lucky, well, it seems you can teach an old dog a new trick!

And as for me, I am awash in wonderment at both the change in Mookah’s temperament and what an intangible, small change it took to accomplish it.

A little patience, a little personal space, a little kindness. A magical lesson that makes me think that no matter what our age, there are still “new tricks” to be learned, if you just keep your mind and heart wide open.

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Ghosts in the Pasture

4/15/2020

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I wrote this essay some years ago, a few months after I'd lost my last horse. It's about putting the horribly painful things in the past behind you, finding peace, and moving forward. I was thinking about it as I drove around this morning, during this time of dreadful news and few good choices, and I realized that at some point, this will also finally be behind us, and we can look forward once more. 

​The weeds in the unused paddock grew five feet high and more, and I parted them gingerly with my hands as I walked across sandy soil to the pasture fence. There had been no equine hooves churning the ground impatiently this summer, prancing and pounding it to bare dirt as I approached for the morning turn-out. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a phantasmagorical forest of lacy and slender foliage sprang gracefully from the windswept soil, a tall, swaying barricade to be traversed before yielding the keys to memory.

I hadn’t started with this goal in mind. All I set out to accomplish was three quick turns around the edge of the property at a brisk walk for some exercise. Drenching rains and pressure cooker temps had combined recently to hatch a vicious crop of mosquitoes, and venturing outside had become like armed warfare. The bugs were winning, the humans cowering behind screens and air conditioners and aerosol cans of smelly insect repellant. But the weather had turned unseasonably cold again, and the chilly morning air and a stiff wind had temporarily parted the veil of bloodsucking pests. Time to press the advantage, and make the most of a walk in the woods before it turned warm and tropic again.
 
I walked happily up and down the hills and along the flats, down a path overhung in places with evergreen branches and through a field of grass shot through with morning glories and milkweed. My route took me alongside the pasture where the horses had grazed for two decades. Brush had grown up along the fence line over the past few years, making the posts and woven wire nearly invisible.
 
I basked in the sunlight as I walked, the wind clean and cool on my face. Not much occupied my mind but the sights and smells around me—a handful of wild mushrooms here, a discarded turkey feather there, pine cones and dead branches, a sumac leaf prematurely turning blood red in a field of green, heralding the inevitable end of summer—and the occasional thought of what new perennial or two I’d like to buy next for the flower beds.

But I slowed as I reached the wooden paddock fence at the end of my last lap, and stopped to look in. It was empty. The last of the horses had died the winter before. The steel water tanks lay tipped forlornly on their sides where they had rested for nearly a year, and the paddock felt strangely silent. No snorts of recognition, no hoofbeats thudding, no hearty knocks and scraping sounds as feed buckets clattered on their hooks while the two horses dove in to their twice-daily race to the bottom. It was always a competition, where the fastest eater then tried to get seconds by shouldering aside the slower gastronome.

I had never seen it like this, and I unlatched the gate. Tall grass had sprung up undisturbed around the base, and it took some tugging to dislodge. The wood had weathered to a splintered, silvery grey from years of use. I left it standing open. No need to bolt it behind me anymore, the casualness going against the grain of thirty odd years of habit in owning horses and cutting off their escape. (Most of the time…) I passed the two-sided shed in the corner of the paddock where they had weathered countless rain and snow storms, and took cover from the blazing sun on the summers’ hottest days. It felt like a ghost town.

The new forest of weeds finally behind me, I struggled a bit with the heavy gate to the pasture itself. It stood in a break between lines of tall evergreens. I stepped through, into the sunlight and three acres of pasture. The grass, ungrazed and untrampled, was deeper and more lush than I had ever seen it before. The clover had long since stopped flowering, but a field of Queen Anne’s lace spread across the middle. There was still a bare groove in the dirt approaching the paddock, worn by two decades of answering the call to the evening feeding at a trot or a gallop. New saplings sprang up at random, with no one left to chew them down.

I walked entirely to the far end of the pasture, something I had rarely done when Hoki and Babe were still alive. Then, my priority was usually to call them in for a feeding or a rendezvous with the veterinarian or the farrier. Vaccinations, hoof trims, examinations for various troubles, there was always a faint air of urgency and impatience to calling them back to closed quarters. This time, I had the twin luxuries of time and reverie. A flock of two dozen cedar waxwings flitted from branch to branch in a dead tree as I passed underneath. I looked for the flock of wild turkeys that had often frequented the pasture, but didn't see or hear them.

Memories came back as I walked, picturesque snapshots from the past. The hard times were forgotten, nailed shut and buried. No thoughts of blizzards, rain storms, colic, middle of the night trips to freezing barns, heartbreaks and desperate measures. The only images that surfaced this day were short, and fragmented, and beautiful. Babe, the palomino, looking like an equine pin-up in a field of flowers, ears pitched forward and brown eyes wide and alert. Hoki, the buckskin, trotting gamely along on arthritic legs to answer the dinner bell, his gait the sign of an old man, but his dappled coat gold and beautiful and, until his last year, still youthful. Babe, wheeling and prancing playfully, or rolling freely in the dirt to scratch her back. Hoki, dense but utterly devoted to his female companion, master of his one-horse “herd.” I finally turned back, feeling very lucky.

As I reached the paddock again, I stopped to check out the emergency fence repairs I had made a couple of years earlier. I still have the cordless drill I bought that same day, and the confidence I gained from having to use it. The boards I sawed and drilled and fastened still looked new. But the twine scaffolding I left hanging from one had disappeared, no doubt nesting material for some bird or mouse in the neighborhood. The pasture gate swung shut more easily this time, and I fastened it one last time out of habit. It would keep no one in or out anymore.

Then I made my way across the sand and back through the ghostly weeds, tugged the second gate firmly into place, shot the bolt home…and closed the gate on the past.



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The Werewolf's Queen

4/5/2020

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This essay about Lucky took home a Silver Award for "creative non-fiction" in the 2021 Royal Palm Literary Awards! 

The young man at my front door with a clipboard and a name tag from a cable TV company rang the doorbell and then stepped back from the front stoop. From within came the sound of ferocious barking, and I struggled to squeeze between the edge of the recliner and the bristling black hackles of my dog, Lucky, to get outside and slam the door behind me.

The barking continued, unabated, despite my repeated admonitions to the door that all was well.
 
“What kind of dog have you got?” the young man asked, respectfully cautious.
 
“Werewolf,” I deadpanned.
 
His eyes widened. “Really?”
 
Sometimes I just can’t help myself. Although Lucky puts on one heck of a show.
 
The “werewolf” at my house will be ten years old this summer. In dog years that’s somewhere around seventy, and there are a few more grey whiskers on his chin than in his salad days. But other than the greys, there is no sign of him stepping down from his self-appointed duties.
 
I brought Lucky home as a puppy, to my spacious house in the country. My youngest son, who had begged me to get a puppy instead of an older dog, went back to college the next day. I was “home alone” with Lucky from then on, an experience akin to being a single mother of an infant with no partner or larger support system.
 
Housebreaking was mercifully quick, and the relationship we forged over time put me at the epicenter of Lucky’s universe, as leader and pack and flock.  Part Border Collie, part who-knows-what, Lucky came with centuries of breeding telling him to protect his herd at all costs.
 
He was certainly built for the task, with a deep chest and long legs, and an intelligent face that includes golden brown eyes accomplished at “the Border Collie stare.” He is shaped like a medium-sized wolf, and has the size and stamina of one too. Coal black except for a white slash down his chest and white tiptoes, he is like reverse lightning when he moves—darkly explosive and turbocharged.
 
He does not make friends easily, but neither does he miss a thing going on around him. He likes to cuddle, too, all seventy pounds of him, and tries to be a lap dog as often as he can. His sharp elbows as he “army crawls” his way a few inches further into my lap can be deadly.
 
Like a Knight of yore, Lucky has three imperatives that guide him every waking moment—defend the Realm; guard the Castle; protect the Queen.
 
When I first brought Lucky home, I had a pretty good-sized realm by any measure. The house where I had lived for three decades and raised my four children sat on nearly fifteen country acres of bucolic woods and fields. The house was surrounded on all sides by flower gardens bursting with roses and coneflowers, peonies and butterfly bushes, snapdragons and phlox and coral bells.
 
Set back behind a line of trees and nearly a city block removed from the two-lane road that provided a street address, it was the perfect place for a high-energy dog to spend his days romping outdoors. Lucky divided his time between walking the land with me, chasing deer and wild turkeys, and feasting on the occasional rabbit. Yes, Lucky was also really fast.
 
Visitors at the front door, other than my boyfriend and occasionally my grown children stopping in, were scarce. Mail was dropped off in a mailbox where the driveway met the road. Trash pickup and newspaper delivery were accomplished there as well. With the exception of having to bark at the occasional evangelizer who drove up to deliver religious pamphlets, Lucky’s guard duties were fairly light.
 
Life is never static, however, and things changed up a lot when we moved four years later to the Midwestern city where I worked. While I had originally planned to buy a house of my own, staking out a new realm and castle and cheerfully planting more roses and coreopsis and delphiniums, the clock was working against me and so I played the cards I was dealt.
 
We rented a small side-by-side duplex.
 
The duplex was in a quiet neighborhood with friendly folks and quiet streets, and had a large yard that wraps around three sides. The yard was unfenced, which meant that Lucky would have to adjust to being on a leash and I would have to walk him several times a day to answer nature’s calls … and to get both of us some exercise.
 
Although it was a struggle at first, Lucky has recalibrated his duties and his horizons accordingly. While he has learned to remain calm (mostly) in the face of every squirrel and rabbit that crosses our path, he still senses that threats to safety and good order are legion.
 
He views the mail carrier who parks his truck nearby and dares to approach the mailbox mounted beside the front door as a Centurion might have eyed the Visigoths as they marched on Rome. UPS delivery trucks, with their cumbersome and uniform brown shapes, are similarly suspect and cause him to raise hackles and growl when he sees them lumber down the street two blocks away. And woe betide the FedEx driver who rings the doorbell before dropping off a package. Lucky is always on the job.
 
My realm, alas, has been vastly reduced. Where I once had big skies and fiery sunsets and tall grasses tossing and fluttering like silk in the wind, I have a corner lot with an abundance of violets and dandelions. Where I had flower gardens full of radiant colors, I have a small boxwood hedge and four flower pots on the stoop holding  geraniums in summer. My living space has been cut by a third, and there is no central air. I’m still selling off excess furniture.
 
And yet I have Lucky at my side, or prancing a few steps ahead. He has mastered the difficult transition, redefined and embraced his new guard duties in the urban jungle, and keeps a vigilant eye on me at all times.
 
And as we step through the door for one of our innumerable walks and I scan the horizon for any dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits, and small children he may perceive as a threat, I am reminded that in Lucky’s golden brown eyes, I still have a realm in need of defending. I still have a castle that needs guarding.
 
And yes, with my erstwhile werewolf companion and protector beside me, I am indeed still a Queen.

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