Massacre

Totoro has been repaired and is back in his usual position on the walnut tree, keeping watch over our little garden.

I'm telling you, I am not a superstitious person, but things go wrong when Totoro is not at his forest-spirit post. On Friday, Dave came home from work to find that a pigeon had been massacred near the back steps. The grass was carpeted with feathers and in the middle of it all lay the poor pigeon's carcass. We decided to leave it there, figuring that something would come along and take it (perhaps the critter that killed it) and indeed that's what happened -- when we woke up yesterday morning, it was gone.

Dave thinks the culprit might have been a cat, but the damage seemed pretty severe. My money is on a fox. Olga was locked indoors at the time, so it couldn't have been her, but she must have had quite a show.

I toyed with what to do about all the feathers on the grass. A rake? I even considered vacuuming them up, but that seemed truly insane. So right now they're all still there.

Anyway, I suppose nature is nature and bad things happen. Bad for the pigeon, that is. Good for whatever ate it.

Everything is relative.

I spent the morning doing every single thing I could think of that I've been meaning to do and hadn't yet done. The list is not exhausted, but I got a lot out of the way. I trimmed the maidenhair fern in the living room and repositioned the climbing rose in the back garden (and lost no blood, amazingly). I did laundry and vacuumed and cleaned the floors and watered all the orchids. (All but one are sending out new blossoms!)

Then I took Olga to the Heath, where some kind of foot race was going on. Every once in a while we'd pass groups of people cheering on runners, yelling "Good man!" or "Go, Nicole!" Olga and I just tried to stay out of the way.

I intentionally did not bring my camera, and it felt so good to be unencumbered. But I couldn't resist an iPhone photo of Olga with that gnarly log.

I also got rid of some dead patio plants and spent-looking houseplants, and we have a few more to discard in next week's yard-waste collection. I always try to keep everything alive through the winter, but the fact is, it's natural for some plants to die. I need to be better about simply letting them go and getting fresh, vigorous ones in the spring.

Last night Dave and I watched "Holy Hell," a Netflix documentary recently mentioned by another blogger. (I can't remember who!) It sounded intriguing -- about a pseudo-Buddhist religious cult incorporating ballet -- and we were not disappointed. Cults are so interesting -- I always come away wondering how people could possibly have fallen for it. But there's something in human nature that makes people want to belong, that craves love, and sometimes it's strong enough to make people set aside common sense.