Cats, Spring, the Dreaded Income Tax, and A Jeep That Refuses to Die

April is the cruelest month.
It teases you with summer
Then torments you with winter.
Katley

Spring has been a long time coming.  The month of March felt more like January and on the 31st of the month, winter let us know it wasn't ready to quit. There was sleet, freezing rain, and accidents on the road.  The temperatures barely hit the freezing mark most days and there were even forecasts for snow.  Fortunately, there was less than a coating for my region, however, friends in Washington, DC got 7" of snow on the first day of Spring!

April is when "real" spring as opposed to calendar spring arrives in New England, although snowstorms have doused the area with snow in early April.  Back in 1997 we had the April Fool's Day Blizzard that brought 18" of snow.  Everyone thought it was a joke until they woke up on April 1 with enough snow on the ground to put January to shame.

In Europe, on the other hand, my German friend Eric told me they hardly had a winter at all, and spring came early.  I enviously looked at Facebook pictures of he and his wife strolling in the park without heavy winter coats.

With April also comes the dreaded filing date for income tax returns in the United States on April 15th.   I find doing income taxes a tedious chore, but it saves me and my husband at least $150.00 to do it at home as opposed to using a tax preparer or a Certified Public Accountant.  I also do the tax returns for my daughters.  It sames them quite a bit of money. As a reward, they take me to a restaurant.

April also brings to mind my cat Fatso, who passed on three years ago.  His obesity contributed to his demise, he died of congestive heart failure. His birthday was April 20, and he died two weeks before his thirteenth birthday.

Fatso, late winter 2011.

Fatso never liked the flash on the camera, so in most of his pictures, his eyes are closed, or almost closed.

Shortly after Fatso passed on, Fluffy, the next door neighbor's cat, decided to move in. Part of the reason was that the kids in one of the apartments next door constantly chased him and tried to dress him in doll clothes.  Fluffy was primarily an outdoor cat and a serial killer as well; dead chipmunks sometimes littered the yard, and one time I caught him in the act of killing one. Aside from the bad habit of leaving dead chipmunks for me to dispose of (he never ate his kills), he was a very sweet and affectionate cat who liked to watch TV with my husband, and sometimes slept with me.  He kept me warm after a freak October snowstorm in 2011 that knocked out electricity in many parts of New England.  We had no heat for an entire week.

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Fluffy the Serial Killer, March 2012.

Fluffy was quite old when we got him, and he had wandering ways.  He left the house one day during the summer of 2013 and never came back. Part of the reason had to do with the cat my daughter brought home after she graduated college the previous year. She and Fluffy didn't get along well and part of it had to do with the disparity in their ages.  She was young and constantly bothered him with friendly attempts to play. It probably reminded him of the harassment he got from the kids next door.

Now that Kitten's grown, and her owner has her own home, I'm going to miss not having a cat around. What I'm not going to miss is cleaning the litter box, and chasing her all over the neighborhood when she escapes out the front door.

Kitten: "I didn't do it!"

One thing all these cats had in common was their affinity for Bulgarian folk music, especially the gaida (bagpipe).  Critters seem to like music made from other dead animals.  It's really weird. Fatso always joined me between 10 and 11 p.m. when the Bulgarian National Radio had its folk music broadcasts, and Kitten often nudged my laptop while I wrote and listened to music.

By the way, you can read something I posted on The Alien Diaries several years ago right after Fatso died.

You can also read the poem I wrote about my son's Jeep.  It is the worst piece of automotive crap on the road, and absolutely refuses to die. The problem is that despite its problems, he has some weird attachment to it.

The poem is on page five of the Fine Flu Journal.

If you're in the mood for springtime silliness, watch this video. This is what we do when the ice finally melts.


Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved.

The End of Winter, Snow Mountains, Shopping Carts, Baba Marta, and March Madness

Winter Haiku #2

winter snow on the
freezing ground lingers
where the hell is spring?
KDB 2014

There is something about the end of winter that's extremely messy.

The large mountains of snow in the parking lots are finally starting to melt, and it's fascinating to see what surprises they yield.  They are also quite disgusting from the road dirt.  I think our air is polluted, too because snow never stays white for more than a day or so.  We are breathing in that nasty stuff.  The dirt in snowbanks and the dust on your furniture is air pollution.  When it comes to pollution, the United States is becoming more like China every day..

An anthropologist two hundred years from now would have a field day analyzing the junk buried in a snow mountain from a parking lot. But the garbage will have been cleaned up long before then. What kind of stuff shows up after the snow melts?

Crusts of pizza, frozen and long abandoned, become sustenance for hungry seagulls. There are soda cans, pizza boxes, and plastic bags: all the flotsam and jetsam of modern society.  Long buried shopping carts, frozen into the ice mountain, magically appear come March.

I'm surprised the Mafia or the gangbangers haven't thought of this method of disposing dead bodies. Think of all the mammoths from the Ice Age that were frozen for posterity and found many centuries later.

There is a book titled The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America, A Guide to Field Identification. The author classified them by category by location and condition, much like a naturalist would categorize flora and fauna. He must be a Virgo with a lot of time on his hands. Read the book reviews, they're quite funny.

Here is the cart I used on a recent shopping trip.  Notice the dirty snowbank in the background.  Some of this snow dates from the first snowstorm in January, and not much has melted since then.  It has been a horrible winter.

Shopping carts have sociological significance. People who can't afford cars use them to bring home groceries. Homeless people use them to transport their worldly goods.  Nothing gets as much abuse as a shopping cart.  Everyone except the store owners (who spend a lot of money on them) see them as expendable. They often get pushed off ravines and into rivers.

The Aldi Supermarket, where I shop for gourmet ethnic food at discount prices, has the right idea.  They have coin-operated shopping carts, and most of them get returned to the store.

Supposedly there is another snowstorm on the way soon.  It's March for goodness sakes, usually by now the crocuses have started to pop up in my front yard.

The Bulgarians have a holiday on March 1, honoring a lady named Baba Marta (Grandma March).  You have to wear a red and white charm, called a Martenitsa for good luck, to ward off winter and bring on spring.  Maybe it's time to get this custom started in the United States, especially since they already have spring weather in Bulgaria.

I am sick of winter!

If you want to learn more about this charming custom, read my companion blog, The Alien Diaries. Maybe it's time to get everyone to wear a Martenitsa. We can make it an arts and crafts project in our schools. It might even take the edge of March Madness, when all the sports crazies are glued to the couch watching basketball.

Here's to an early spring!

Announcement!

Three of my poems (pages 62-64)  have been published recently in The Art of Being Human, Volume 9,  an anthology of international poetry. What a wonderful collection of great poetry from around the world! Thank you, Daniela Voicu and Brian Wrixon, for making this possible.  .

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved.

A New Year, A New Beginning, and Why I Hate Winter

photo: Light And Shadow at West Potomac Park, Washington DC

©Katley Demetria Brown 2013

Happy New Year 2014! And thank you for stopping by.

This is the first post of Light and Shadow, a blog dedicated to poetry, photography, and a little bit of this and that. I will also be offering chapbooks for sale at a future date on this site. By writing, I hope to raise some money for a future trip to Bulgaria.

Light and Shadow will be different from my other blog, The Alien Diaries.  It will complement the Alien Diaries, and refer to it periodically. If you like music from the Balkans, or music and dance in general, it's well worth a look.

Each month there will be a different theme with a poem, a photo, or both. 

Today's theme is Why I Hate Winter. It's February, and it's bitterly cold.  There is about a foot of snow on the ground right now, and more to come this weekend.  The entire blade of this shovel is covered in snow.

That's nothing compared to the February snowstorm of 2013, which was a real blockbuster.  It lasted for two days, left 24" of snow on the ground, and we couldn't go anywhere by car until the snowplow reached our street.  My husband was up early the day it ended and he managed to shovel the walk. A helpful neighbor came by his snowblower and blew out some of the driveway.

The street wasn't plowed until later that afternoon. This YouTube video shows the tractor with the plow attachment assigned to clear our street. A truck with four wheel drive would have been a better choice.  The motor on this vehicle sounds very sick.

There was once a time when I enjoyed winter.  I was young, didn't have to worry about shoveling snow, and even worse, driving in it.  Snow was magic. Packed down, it made for excellent sled runs on the hills of Soundview Houses in the Bronx, where I grew up.

I used to ski on it, sled on it, and play in it.  Not anymore.

That all changed when I moved to Massachusetts, which is colder and snowier than the Bronx, and I had to drive everywhere, even when it snowed. Although schools take snow days, those of us who work for a living have to go to work unless the snow makes it totally impossible.

I got older and my cold tolerance plummeted.

Heating oil is expensive, so I keep my house cold.  Once in a while I turn on the heat and huddle by the radiator and share my thoughts on one of my blogs.

The thing I hate most is shoveling snow.  It involves being out in the cold and wind; gloves and boots get wet, and it's very physically demanding work.  It can also be fatal to those with a heart condition, fortunately I am in good enough shape for hard labor.

And finally, here's a haiku I wrote about shoveling the driveway.  It is the first in the series of haikus about winter.

Winter Haiku #1

Time to shovel it
Wet, cold, heavy and white
The driveway awaits.

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved.