Scaredy Cat

I am by no means, a cat psychologist, but the strangest thing happened this past week. Spooky is a part Siamese cat Bill found hiding in a wood pile when she was a wee kitten nearly twelve years ago. She is a devoted pet to me, but when others are around, she is scarce. She hides under a chair or sofa when family members come to call and only dashes out and streaks for the bedroom if somebody frightens her out. She's been this way since birth. Willy jokes that I don't really have a second cat, since he's only seen the back end of her running down the hallway. Very occasionally, she will allow Charlie or Sage to pet her, but it is usually only when she is half awake from a nap and they have moved very slowly.

When we first moved here to Arizona, she spent the best part of the first month living in the guest bedroom. Indeed, the first week we were here, she spent it wedged up inside a small cupboard with a false bottom. The Hidier the Better in Spooky's world. Since DeLores was arriving for a week's visit, I wanted to vacate the bedroom of the cats for her. So two weeks ago, I 'evicted' the cats from the guest room and tried to make the sun room more welcoming. It worked pretty well. Spook settled in to a small red velour cat house on the floor, with an opening small enough that Chuy doesn't stick his nose into. The rest of the time she spends sleeping under the recliner loveseat in the front room. So... I thought... I hoped things would be 'okay' when DeLores arrived.

I wasn't convinced that it would be so. I half worried that just having somebody else in the house would destroy any of the peace Spooky was showing lately. A few days before she arrived, I even got Spook to join Kickers in a Deck Outing. On the deck, we've got two big wire dog carriers we've rigged up with perches so we can take the parrots out for sunning. One of the carriers is so large, we've even got a separator in them. The birds are having a good time communing with the wild birds and Bill has set it up with a fan that blows a cool mist on them when it gets too hot. (Wind and fog are something we were never at a lack for in Dillon Beach, but hmmmm... in Arizona, it's rather nice to be cooled with a misty fog.) But Kickers decided several weeks ago that one of the parrot's cages on the deck was a dandy place to view the wild birds that flocked nearby and she goes out for hours at a time, perfectly happy. So last week, I got Spook to join her. At first, she was definitely apprehensive, but by the second time, she seemed to settle down and like it.

Maybe it was the open wire carrier on the deck that 'opened' Spook up to new conditions that did it. Maybe it was just that since she's going to be twelve years old this summer, she's decided that she can change. Whatever... she did it. By the end of the second day, she was letting DeLores lure her and allowed DeLores to stroke her. She wouldn't flee the room when DeLores entered it. She even rolled in the sunshine and regarded DeLores as another 'Mama'. She has let my friend Pam stroke her, but this was when we'd been gone for vacation for several weeks and Pam had to spend a lot of time getting the cat to let her get near her. Spooky seemed to be all in favor of having DeLores as our guest and while she didn't gush over her as Kickers did, she kept coming out and letting DeLores pet her each day. We were plain amazed!

One of the aspects DeLores and I have in common are that DeLores has two partial Siamese cats too that I have yet to see! They do not like company or anybody strange in their home and though she tells me she has those two, I've never seen them! So maybe there is a special Siamese mysterious about DeLores and I that these sorts of cats like. DeLores' cats are only four years old, so I told her she might have to wait eight more years before her cats come out for company. And maybe, Spooky won't do this again for the next person who visits. But personally, I think the move to Arizona has 'loosened' her up and by the time I get her back to Dillon Beach this summer, she'll be such a well traveled cat, she'll welcome anything that comes her way.

Well.... I can hope so, can't I?

Wildflower Friday

We got out to the desert yesterday afternoon to make our acquaintance with the riotous blooming wildflowers. Some of the flowers are about spent while others, like the cactus flowers, are only beginning. This one to the left that looks like a poppy on steriods is actually a Desert Mariposa Lily. You can't see it that well from the picture but the middle is a vibrant purple and the color is clear bright orange. The tangerine/orange of the mallow are what was really overwhelming in the mountain pictures. The little blue one halfway up is called a Blue Dick, (why? I do not know!), and the bright pink one is some mountain Penstemon we found growing along a stream bank.

My friend DeLores is here visiting for a few days and the trip into the desert was fun to take to show her what we've found. We combined it with a (futile) attempt to find the old Silver King Cemetary situated near the old Silver King Mine (which we found) and the remains, if any, of the ghost town of Silver King. We didn't find that either. But we were in the right 'neck of the woods', so we'll try it again some day.

Later, yesterday, the wind blew hard from the east, and continued that way all night. It was still howling this morning and we changed our plans for riding the Harleys and drove to a hot rod show in Globe instead. The old cars were pretty hot and it is amazing to me the number of people who spend inordinate loving hours restoring or rebuilding these gorgeous old cars. There was also a road rally of Shelbys, so Highway 60 was alive with metallic bundles of car dollars today. A good day just to play Looky-Loo! So whether it was hot flowers or hot cars, we've seen plenty in the past few days. And maybe the wind will lay low and we can be Harley folks tomorrow.

Birthday Mama

Today is my oldest son's, Willy, birthday. He's a whopping 38 years old. It feels hard to believe that thirty eight years ago I became a mama for the first time. Sometimes, that day feels like it was only yesterday, I can remember nearly the whole day. At other times, it seems so far away, it might have happened in another time, long, long ago. So Happy Birthday, Willy, for your thirty-eight great years on God's green earth.

We used to have a friend, who would congratulate me each time Willy had a birthday, since he said, it was the mother who was really having a 'birth' day. And each time he said that, it would conjure up the whole brand new motherhood thing for me again.

Poor Willy, being the First, he didn't get the best mother in the world. Sometimes, I doubted whether I was even fit to be a mother. It was 1970, and at twenty, I decided I could do it all. I'd be a mother, but I'd also be working our resort business and doggone it, since there was no commute and no childcare, why couldn't I do it all? So I did, but I don't believe I did any one of those things all that well. He was a child who cried a lot and the consensus of the day was to let the baby cry himself to sleep. I spent a LOT of time listening to that poor kid cry himself to sleep. But you know what I heard on the nightly news last night? On the eve of my thirty-eighth year of becoming a mother? That "experts" now believe it is better for the baby's mental and physical health to let them go to sleep on their own naturally. If that means letting them cry it out, then that's better. It's better to put poor baby down and let him sob to sleep than it is to spend hours rocking him. That last bit about rocking him, really hit me. I can't tell you how many times I've sat with other mothers who expounded on the many hours spent rocking their babies to sleep and I felt mute with dismay because I hadn't rocked my own boys. There wasn't time. So while a little feller cried himself to sleep, I'd spend my time making dinner or cleaning up. (Willy, for your information, I wasn't having a lot of fun myself while you were crying yourself to sleep!) But I did do it anyway. The baby sleep experts they quoted on last night news, said that the babies who went to sleep on their own, without all the rocking and fussing by the mother or being put into the parents' bed were children whose sleep habits were more natural and sound and (get this next one...) also grew up to be adults who did not have weight problems. Now... that bit really surprised me!

So, Happy Birthday, Willy. You've grown into a fine man who doesn't suffer from sleep deprivation (unless you have to get up with your own little sons) and you don't have a weight problem. I'm proud that I was a mother so far ahead of her time that I was thinking of your middle aged health when I let you go to sleep fussing and crying. But also, goodness me! Aren't I too young to be a mother of a thirty-eight year old?

Mattie's Grave

We've been searching for Mattie's grave off and on for the past year or more. And today, with a modicum of Good Luck, we were able to find it. The desert grave of Mattie Blaylock Earp, the second 'wife', (common law, that is) of Wyatt Earp, famed Western gun fighter/law man depending on who you talk to. She died in the little mining town of Pinal City, Arizona on July 3, 1888 and is buried in the Pinal City Cemetery.

The cemetery is a hard place to find. It's been looted a number of times so the location is written about and passed along by mouth, but even so, one expanse of Sonoran Desert looks suspiciously like another and even when you think you've found the right rutted patch of road to follow to the grave sites, you're never quite sure. Bill and I thought we'd found the 'right place' on a trek we took on Valentine's Day, but never discovered the graves. Turns out we were only maybe a quarter mile or less away from them, but until this afternoon, we hadn't found it.

We participated in a town clean up today. About forty active participants took part in driving their trucks and utility trailers around town picking up trash and yard clippings and old household items people couldn't get to the dump on their own. The dump stayed open for five hours, taking all the stuff we hauled in for free. It was a LOT of work and we filled eight drive off dumpsters in that time. Bill and I hauled six loads with our trailer, manhandling old harvest gold sofas and chairs from the Seventies, rolls of carpet, piles and piles of prickling mesquite and other thorny waste and many, many tires to the dump. When we finished, they gave us participants a picnic and the mayor cooked us hotdogs. And then we got to talk to some of the townspeople who "know things".

We started telling one couple how we'd finally found the old silver mining town of Pinal City, out by the Arboretum. They said they hadn't been able to locate it, but had we ever found Mattie's Grave. We laughed and said, no, we'd been searching for it off and on since last year. We described a peak we thought it was on, just east of the Arboretum. The couple said no, that wasn't it, and proceeded to tell us where it was located. Now, I'm sorry but I'm not going to repeat it for I guess this pioneer cemetery has been looted enough, so you're going to have to search this out on your own. Turns out when we tried the second time this past February we were very close to finding it. We just didn't get quite close enough.

The town story is that since looters had disturbed Mattie's original grave, townsfolk had dug her up and deposited her elsewhere, in a quiet undisclosed location. But they've made a fine effort of decorating up the grave that's still in the Pinal City Cemetary. There's a nice wrought iron cross with "BLAYLOCK" written out on it and a wooden post with a mounted picture of Mattie and a sweet poem, testifying to her hard life and addiction to laudanum before she died in her mid-Thirties. And if you look real close, you'll see what Bill and I were excited about when we viewed the picture on the computer this evening. Not orbs, exactly, but a ray of light emanating down from Mattie's picture over the poem. If that's not a Sign that she's pleased we found her, I don't what is.

There's other graves there too and I have yet to look over the other pictures I took up there. But if any more spirits show up in them, I'll post some more here. For now, here's Mattie's resting place and I'm pleased to have found it. It's like: Bill and I are beginning to think Superior is welcoming us aboard by slowly letting us have access to some of its long held secrets.

Kids On The Beach

I needed my Kid Fix. It has been two and a half months since I kissed those little boys good-bye last January and made my way to Arizona, and I was getting lonely for them. So Bill bought me a plane ticket the day after Easter and I flew home to see them. Turns out, they sorta needed a Grandma Fix too, so it worked out fine. They were off from school the week after Easter and the weather was lovely, high Sixties - low Seventies, not as warm as the desert maybe, but perfectly Playable Weather. So we played. Big Time!

Pam's grand kids were visiting too and there were neighbors out of school as well, so most days, it wasn't just Grandma and her two grandsons on the beach, but a whole slew of kids eager to tramp the beach and get sand between the toes or waves splashing up on pant legs. I emptied more sand out of Sage's shoes last week! He must have carried in a shoe box full or more from the walks on the beach.

Plus, there were puppies. Kerry has a new baby Aussie cattle dog, a red one, born last December she's named Maggie. For three months old, she proved quite resilient in keeping up with the kids on their romps through the sand dunes. Haley and Garrett's nine month old chocolate Lab, Maco, is fat and sassy and must weigh close to eighty pounds by now. Chuy will find his old 'chew buddy' to be more than he can handle when he returns this summer. (Yes, Chuy had to stay in the desert with Bill. The boys were delighted to see me but said the visit would have been better with Chuy there too.)

Charlie and Sage got to have a Sleep Over with me too. So that first night, Daddy had to bring us a box of Macaroni and Cheese to fix for dinner. My pantry was bare. What is the allure of mac and cheese with the grammer school crowd? When Charlie proudly crowed to Pam's grand kids that HE was having mac and cheese for dinner, the two of them groaned and said, "Oh you're so lucky! I wish we could have mac and cheese for dinner!" Boppy and I could probably survive very nicely all year long without ever eating that stuff, but Charlie and Sage would gladly swill it every night. I did make them eat salad too. Just because I'm Grandma. (And they ate it, because I'm Grandma.) But the next night, when I put a salad on the table with their pizza, Sage said, "Grandma! You served salad last night!" "Yes, Sage! And I'm serving it again tonight!" (Now, if that had been mac and cheese.... hmmm...)

And the next morning, of course, we had to have pancakes. They just adore pancakes. And then Thursday morning when they came tearing in at nine AM, we made cinnamon toast. Cinnamon toast is one of those childhood treats that just taste better a) if you're between five and nine years old or b) you eat it with a child between five and nine years old. So we did. And it was.

We made cupcakes. My friend, DeLores sent the boys a jar of fish shaped sprinkles. There were dolphin, sea turtles, sharks and tropical fish, in all array of colors. The sharks were even gray colored. So one afternoon we made and frosted cupcakes, and then they parceled out the sprinkles. It's still funny to me, but when it comes to eating the treats they've artfully decorated, the boys inevitably choose the ones with no sprinkles or the very least sprinkles. Yes, they love to use them, they just don't like to eat them. So Grandma gets the ones with the most sprinkles!

A few memorable funnies: Walking through the sand dunes, Sage finds a treasure. "What's this, Grandma?" "It's a bone, Sage." I peered at it closer. "It looks like a back bone to me." He turned the vertebrae over in this hand. "And this other side is the front bone?" he asked.

Charlie was waiting for an answer from his dad who had to confirm it with Mommy. "I don't know the answer yet, Mackey. Because Daddy hasn't got to conversate with Mommy yet." (That conversatin' is heavy stuff!)

Okay, so now I'm home and replete with photos and pictures the kids had to draw for Chuy before I left. Charlie made a video using Sage as his Star Actor too. It was a good trip, though a short one. But at least the kids know Mackey still loves them. And it will only be two more months before I'll be back to the beach for the summer with them.

A Pretty Corpse

Once again, I'm going to blog on the proposed Resolution Copper Mine that wants to get started in Superior. Every time I write about it, I get read by folks in Virginia and Washington DC and sometimes in faraway countries around the world. I'm not doing this to gain readership. I'm doing it because something doesn't smell right. And it seems there's very few people that really know what is going on.

This week, some friends back in California sent me an issue of the 'High Country News'. The February 18 issue. It had a six page article on the perplexing problem of whether or not Superior, Arizona should accept the proposed mine Resolution Copper has for it. The editor and writer spoke to economists and townsfolk and miners and Indians and the copper company itself. And their conclusions? The copper mine probably isn't the best thing that could happen to Superior. Because of the short intensity of the high tech mining that is done these days, the area won't be able to sustain the Boom it needs and within a very short time, will be back to hard scrabble times. The Big Money the copper mine is promising Arizona and the US in return for the Land Swap (still before the Senate) won't be enough to sustain the local economy and the few jobs that will be available for the locals during the short term, aren't going to be there for long. So any big growth for Superior won't be sustainable.

Then the news gets worse: IF the Land Swap bill goes forward, Senator McCain made some environmental provisions for the British owned Resolution Copper (partly owned by Rio Tinto, a global mining company). The part I had heard about that gave me chills was that NOTHING would befall the copper company if worse came to worse and the Apache Leap mountain imploded under the block caving methods they mean to do at more than seven thousand feet deep under the mountain. That part just leaves me numb! But now, there's more. Under the Land Swap bill, McCain would exempt Resolution Copper from following the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). There would be no public oversight on copper smeltering or how much groundwater and Central Arizona Project water would be used. The company has said they would pump the billions of gallons from the old Magma Mine mineshaft down to the valley in Pinal County where it will be purified from other water, but again, with no NEPA public oversight, nobody will know how much good fresh water is being diverted.

I don't understand why the citizens of the US are expected to conduct their business in an orderly manner and follow all the environmental rules and regulations set down by the Feds and the State, but that some big global company can get away with not following the same rules. NO FAIR!

I think, and again, this is my opinion, but I think this Land Swap bill needs to be folded up and put away in somebody's desk. Resolution Copper will just fade away and go down to Indonesia or Mongolia to reap (rape?) what it can from those countries coffers of copper. Superior doesn't need it. It has had its mining. It still has its looks. It's going to be getting better from the good folks who are willing to work to change it for the better. But it's not going to be from another "Copper Boom".

I guess we need to tell Senator McCain and the other senators that might be inclined to vote for the Land Swap Bill that you can dress a corpse up in pretty clothes and make her look good, but... she's still a corpse. Superior doesn't need this mine. There's better days ahead of her than that road.

Geode City

We didn't discover the vast amount of new and different wildflowers we expected to find today on our trek. Instead, we discovered a vast hillside, actually two of them separated by a canyon, of geodes. There were few of them that you could actually break open with a hammer and see the quartz and crystal inside. Instead, these were all molten and spread out on the hillside for everyone to see. It was like you took a giant geode, five or six acres in size, and spead it inside out on the hill. There were many broken bits of them in the tumbled rocks down the hillside, but the best ones were still embedded in the hill, showing off their stuff.

We still had our picnic. We still took a few pictures of wildflowers. But here we were so hot to find new and different wildflowers and instead stumbled on this geologic wonder. I guess it never works to make plans in advance, for the next turn in the road, something better turns up. And today it was rocks. And lots of them!