Too Much Nature! Aieeeeee~

Some days I feel exactly like Monk. No, I don’t mean I’m all in the kitchen, rearranging the canned goods by expiration date. No. I don’t have to do that:  I went through all the stuff in the cupboard this week and put everything that had expired, even by a day, into two empty wine boxes to leave out by the mailbox. Tomorrow is the annual postal carrier food drive. We put canned goods out every year. Here’s the dilemma:  do I put out the things that are past due? Or do I throw those away? If I throw them away, it’s guaranteed that no one will use them. If I put them in the box and they take them away, I assume someone will sort them and decide if they’re usable. It’s not like we’re talking about 10-year-old cans of Spam. No. I’m talking about things like jars of pickles that have a “best if used by” date from last year. So it’s not Don’t Eat After This Date. It’s more a suggestion about freshness, pretty much.  I assume it’s still perfectly good, but I cannot eat it. Can. Not. I had food poisoning as a kid from eating a bowl of canned chili. I have never eaten chili since, and I never eat anything from a can that is

1) dented
2) bulging or lopsided or otherwise out of whack
3) even a day past its “best if used by” date
4) has an ugly label, because, you know, if they don’t care enough to make the label appealing, who knows what shortcuts they took with the food inside, right? They could have undercooked it or something in their slovenly, corner-cutting way. Lazy bastards.
Fortunately, this is usually a moot point, as we eat very little that comes from cans. Since we eat mostly fruit, vegetables, cheese, and tofu, we hardly ever have to think about Best By Dates. Fruit pretty much lets you know.
But that’s not the point. It’s not Monk’s Food Issues I’m feeling here. It’s his aversion to nature, as in “Aieeee! Nature is touching me!”
Now, normally I love nature. The trees. The leaves. The little birdies.
Those fucking little birdies. They’re driving me  absolutely totally nuts today. Today was, apparently, Leave the Nest Day for the little grackles. I don’t know if they jumped or if their parents pushed their ugly little butts out, but they were out. Yes, indeed.
For days, the grackles have been harassing my new friend, Humphrey. The EGE and I have been ignoring this cat, thinking he was a stray who was squatting in our carport, trying to establish a camp and putting up a little tent and a Coleman stove back there behind the recycling. We need another stray cat around here like we need more tie-dyed underwear. I.e.:  not anytime soon.
So we’d been averting our eyes when we went out to the car and he scurried out of the carport. And then one of us—I won’t mention any names here, but it would be the one with a Serious Weakness for Cats—started having conversations with him. This is a cat who talks a LOT, in a grumbly, talking-to-himself sort of way. When Angel Rodriquez is around, which would be every afternoon at 5 p.m. when she comes down and hunts for The EGE and convinces him to walk her home and give her her daily treat, Humphrey (although of course we didn’t yet know that was his name) tried to hang out with her. This cramps her style terribly, and she’s a hateful, snotty bitch to him. She growls and chases him off, and he stalks away, trying to maintain some shred of dignity, grumbling to himself about how he was only trying to be neighborly.
So the other day when I walked Angel home (I’m totally Backup Neighbor for her, totally A Substitute she has to tolerate when The EGE isn’t outside), I noticed the black cat sitting patiently outside the garage apartment two houses down. I asked one of Angel’s people, and that’s how I found out his name is Humphrey. So, relieved to know he has a home already, I set about making friends with him.
Poor guy. The grackles hate him above all else. They loathe him. They rue the day he was born. They follow him up and down the sidewalk, yelling constantly at the top of their creaky, grackle-y voices. He grumbles the whole time. I asked him what was up, what he’d done to piss them off.
He said, “Hell if I know.”
Turns out he lied.
Today I go out to take care of The Flies, and I find out The Rest of the Story. But first I must digress. Sorry.
Oh, the flies! It’s all Amityville Horror in our carport. Remember that scene, where approximately 79,000,000,000 horrible flies fill the bedroom? Give or take a dozen? It’s been like that every day this week in our carport.
Flies freak me out. I worked at Animal Control and for the vet and the SPCA too long not to have had too many encounters with flies and their lovely larvae. I loathe them both. And when you find a huge buzzing swarming battalion of flies somewhere, you’re going to find one of three things:
1) garbage of a magnitude intolerable to those of us who try not to think about what happens to the food we scrape into the trash and take to the dumpster, about how rapidly it turns into something we can’t even bear to consider
2) shit. Literally.
3) something dead.
Since we’ve had some cat things going on recently—one dead, one missing, one taken far away—the flock of huge, fat, bloated flies—I swear I saw one today that was as big as a quarter—set off all kinds of alarm bells in my tired little brain. I knew Cutie Pie was well buried on the other side of the house—The EGE has buried more than a couple cats over the decades, and he knows what he’s doing. I didn’t think Garf had had time to make his way home and die, and—here’s what made this infestation marginally bearable—I hadn’t smelled anything. Usually I smell the odor about the same time I notice the flies, and since my nose is quite excellent, I can easily track down whatever is dead, even if it’s down the block.
There was no odor. There was no shit. There was nothing at all that we could figure out that would cause a billion flies to inhabit the carport. In fact, we’d just cleaned it out completely a couple weeks ago. There are the bags of smushed aluminum cans waiting to be taken to recycling, and for a second I thought maybe the flies were after the syrup from the cans. Then I smacked myself in the forehead and went, “Duh.” All the cans are from Fizzy Water—the carbonated stuff I drink that has nothing in it—nothing real or artificial—except a hint of lemon. No sweetener of any kind.
I do not like to kill things. I try not to kill anything unless it bites me:  mosquitoes are pretty much the only thing I kill on purpose. And I hate to use poisonous sprays. But this? This was intolerable for me. And so I went out and bought some fly spray that’s supposed to last for 4 weeks on your Patio and Garden. I put a bandana over my face, held my breath, and sprayed the crap out of that carport. Which meant I first had to close all the windows and put plastic bags over the hummingbird feeders, but it was worth it.
The next morning, the flies were back. Again with the mask, again with the feeders. I couldn’t stand it—those suckers are HUGE. Filled up with what? is what I don’t want to even think about.
Now we’re on Day Three of my Battle Against the Flies. There are dozens of dead flies in the carport—in a neat little pile where my husband swept them up, and then scattered around from today’s ambush. But they keep sending fresh recruits. I have no idea where they’re coming from. Neither does my neighbor, who doesn’t seem to be particularly freaked out by their huge juiciness. I carefully led her to suggest that it could, possibly, be dog shit in her backyard, leading her to mention this in such a way that I’m hoping they’ll check that and be more careful (I didn’t mention “dogs” nor suggest anything in her yard was amiss; I just steered the conversation in that direction and let her do it herself so I wouldn’t have to go, “Hey, do y’all clean up your dogs’ crap every day like we do for our cats?” Call me manipulative, but at least I wasn’t rude.)
Anyway. So The Flies. I go out to back out the truck so I can once again spray the carport, and the grackles have lost their minds. They’re dive-bombing the truck, screaming and startling the crap out of me when they nearly crash into my head. I shoo them away, and they sit in the tree over me, yelling and threatening to kill me. Or crap on me. Same thing.
But wait. What’s that sound in the carport? I  start to walk in, but the flies are everywhere, and I can hear something moving around, and it’s dark (it’s actually more a garage with no front, so it’s dark and enclosed,), and I can’t see, and I think, “Gee. I don’t think I’m going to just walk in there.” You know, like all the white people in the scary movies just walk into the house when the flies are swarming and the stairs are heaving and buckling and the voice growls, “GET OUT!”
Richard Pryor did a great piece on that, and let me tell you this:  I’m not nearly that white.
I back up and get down on my knees in the driveway, which is not fun because it’s 3,020 degrees out there, and that sucker is HOT.
OK, it’s 103. Still. Think of frying eggs on the sidewalk, only it’s skin. I could hear sizzling.
I can’t see shit. I get up, move to another vantage point, can see something dark moving around. I keep trying to see, through the gloom and the buzzing hoards of gigantinormous flies, and finally I’ve just had it and say, “Fuck,” much to the amusement of my neighbor, who’s watering her flowerbed and watching me crawl around on the hot cement and mutter to myself, and I go in the house and get the keys and forge my way through the thundering hoards of carnivorous flies and lock myself in the cool safety of the truck and back it out. Very. Very. Slowly. With much honking of the horn.
Humphrey scurries out of the carport. I park and go in and look, and it’s a grackle baby, hugely ugly and only partially feathered, 99% legs and beak. The beak is bloody—Humphrey has already gotten to him—and I see now why the grackles hate him so. The grackle-ette is terrified and runs to the cat cage and tries to get inside, wedging its head between the bars and yelling pitifully. The parents go nuts. I cuss some more and go in and find The EGE’s gloves (since I don’t want to get Bird Mites on my own, selfish bugger that I am) and go out, grumbling not unlike Humphrey himself, and take hold of the baby bird, who’s completely freaked out by now, and pry his feet off the cage bar and carry him out under the tree. The parents squawk and fly furiously around my head. I set the baby down, and Humphrey runs out of nowhere and grabs him. I yell and try to grab Humphrey. We do not know each other that well yet, though, and he suggests that now would be a good time to leave him alone and not be grabbing him. The baby bird yells. The flies swarm around our heads. Humphrey is testy.
I say a variety of bad words in really creative combinations.
Then I give up and take off the gloves and come in the house and get ready to go to the post office. There’s not much I can do. No way to save the baby—what am I going to do with an injured grackle baby? Nobody likes them—they rob other birds’ nests, kill their babies, steal their eggs. The local bird rehabilitator says she’s seen a grackle, flying, snatch another bird out of the air, kill it, drop it, and never miss a wingbeat.
They’re Not Very Nice Birds.
But I can’t stand to sit and watch the baby die. So I leave and tell Humphrey he’d better have it taken care of by the time I get back. Of course, I first have to take the broom and shoo it out from under the car, where he’s carried it, before I can drive away.
I come back an hour later. The baby has made its way to the fence. The parents are going nuts.
And then—then!—The EGE comes home and we’re out on the porch, and he notices THE OTHER baby grackle, which has apparently fallen out of the pine tree and is sitting, stunned, at its base. And what’s that in the tree? Why, it’s Candy the squirrel, sitting on the branch, trying to figure out what the hell is going on with the birds and Humphrey (who’s spent the rest of the afternoon pouting on the neighbor's porch), and what’s that ugly naked thing down on the ground?
I go in the house and get her a pecan out of the pocket of my bathrobe—because of course we all have pecans in the pockets of our loungewear—and take it out to her. She stares at me, not seeing me, listening, for a minute, and then she snaps out of it and takes the pecan and sits up to eat. She’s freaked out, too. I sit down and start stitching and then look up just in time to see the daddy grackle swoop down out of the tree and crash into Candy. I think she’s been knocked out of the tree, but The EGE said she jumped onto the roof and ran away. I’m dumbfounded. I’ve seen them swoop over the heads of the cats, but I had no idea they’d actually attack anything larger than they are.
Jesus. This has gone on all afternoon.
Well. I end up setting a little table on its side to make some shade and then misting water over both babies, hoping to keep them cool until something happens. Since I doubt either of them is suddenly going to figure out how to fly, the end is pretty evident. Basically I’m just basting them for Humphrey, is what I’m doing. But at least I felt like I did something. Not enough, of course.
I didn’t make a little nest in the cat cage and herd the baby grackles into it and then catch a bunch of flies and grind them up into Fly Stew. I could have done that.
But, frankly, I’m tired of nature. Sometimes it’s just too messy and ugly, and sometimes you just have to Let It Go.

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