Little Mama

Four gray kittens, offspring of the feral cat who had kittens in my back yard a few weeks ago. pounce on one another and wrestle with the monkey grass border of the flower bed. This is serious play in which they are learning the art of being cats. It won't be long before they are stalking birds and butterflies.

My neighbors and I enjoy watching Little Mama and her kittens, but we worry about the increasing population of our little colony. We have successfully trapped several of the cats and taken them to be spayed or neutered at a program called Snip and Tip, then brought them home and released them to their familiar territory – our backyards. Last Sunday, we caught Little Mama, the mother of our four kittens, and took her in. Her babies are eating dry cat food, so we knew they would be fine for a day or two without her.

Since Little Mama is a nursing mother, we were told to keep her indoors for about 48 hours. They were worried that the kittens might pull out her stitches when they nursed. We tried. Mitch and Donna put her in their spare bedroom to give her time to heal. The plan was to release her Tuesday after work. It seemed like a good plan until she managed to get out of her cage, which had a faulty door. Apparently, she yowled most of Monday and spent time sitting in the window looking toward my house.

My friends wisely released Little Mama on Tuesday morning, and she promptly came into my backyard to reunite with her kittens. She walked around a bit as though she were checking to make sure she was in her proper territory, went to the food dishes and ate voraciously, then located her kittens and started licking them and allowing them to nurse. She looked very relieved.

Little Mama is a good little mama. Initially, she looked anxious, but she quicklly learned to do well at nurturing and at letting go. I think God is like her in this regard, a mother who nurtures and loves enough to allow her children the freedom to learn the art of being who they are, cat or human.

At the Beach

I just got back from my annual trek to Mexico Beach, which has changed little in fifty years. It has a few more large houses than it did when we went there as children, but I can still point out rentals we stayed in when I was a child...small concrete block houses between Highway 98 and the beachfront and larger old frame houses with screen porches on Beacon Hill. My father, ever the optimist, just drove us down there, then found a rental house after we arrived. He would not be able to do that today. I remember driving over the canal at Overstreet and then having contests with my siblings to see who would be first to spot “the beach.” We ususally went during blue crab season, and we spent early mornings catching them with crab nets. My parents boiled them, cracked them, then served them to us with lemon butter sauce. At the time, I was not aware that we were eating gourmet food!

My mama taught her children to fear two things: snakes and sunshine. We were raised in Southwest Georgia and Northwest Florida, the land of boiled peanuts, and in this region snakes and sunshine are plentiful and fierce. Rather than worry about whether a snake was poisonous , Mama taught us to avoid all of them. Rather than lathering her children with sun screen, Mama taught us to get out of the sun by 10 AM and go back out after 4 PM. I still avoid snakes, even though the world would be overrun with mice without them. Fortunately, you don't see many snakes on the white sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. They hide in the pine and palmetto woods. And when I go the the beach, I enjoy sunlight until 10 AM, then I hear my mother's sharp voice, “Get inside this house right now. You have been in the sun long enough! Do you want to get blistered?” No, Mama. I don't want to get blistered.

So, what did it mean to me to be “at the beach” if not to soak up sunshine? “At the beach” means rest and family connection. When my siblings and I gather with our families, we walk, swim, watch sunsets, listen to the surf break on the shore, reminisce, read, and look for green peanuts at the Piggly Wiggly in Port Saint Joe so we can make boiled peanuts. We watch the next crop of children learn about sandspurs, jellyfish, seashells, land crabs, digging in the white sand, and making sand castles by dripping sandy water. “At the beach” is a synonym for sabbath.

I did get a nice tan, but I didn't get blistered. I minded my mama's words. I was in by 10 and out after 4.