The Mortality of Tomatoes and Cats

Puck has been up and down since his visit to the vet. They have taken his blood twice and not figured out what’s wrong with him. in March, he came home very depressed from a dental procedure the vet insisted was necessary. I discovered a raw wound under a flat of skin and fur and treated it with antibiotic ointment until it healed. the vet has never acknowledged that anything went wrong there. Puck has had some difficulty eating since then. He shakes his head from side to side, but the vet insists nothing is wrong in his mouth. He lost a lot of weight, became very depressed and essentially stopped eating. I have him eating now and much happier. My assistant Melenie flew off this week to Philadelphia for her husband Jay’s uncle’s funeral, so I have been mostly in the garden planting and weeding. All the tomatoes are in although in the main garden, we have much infant mortality. First time that has happened. The paste tomatoes in my garden that I was able to plant in raised beds are all doing fine. Off to a garden sale this morning that supports the Sampson Fund, an organization that provides veterinary care for companion animals whose people can’t afford it. I’ll get some tomato plants for Dale, who has to work, and a few to fill in the empty spaces where the seedlings I started in the little greenhouse have died. Not being able to kneel means I can’t plant except in raised beds. Woody has to do all the rest of the planting I usually do. It’s frustrating. I am going to try today to see what I can do without kneeling, somehow.I have been putting ornamentals into pots, where I can tend them. Calla lilies, for instance. My wild and silly project this year is trying to grow three artichoke plants. I just transplanted them into huge pots. I know it’s silly, but I couldn’t resist. I have planted two huge pots of shade loving plants on either side of the brick walkway that leads up to the house and a shallow wide pot of sun loving orange and purple plants for the gazebo terrace. in the late fall, Woody stows all the garden furniture in the gazebo. This week, he took it all out, so we are now able to use the gazebo and have been having our early afternoon coffee there. This has been the first week in a month and a half that I have not done any interviews. I am reading mss. for my juried intensive poetry class. There are always pleasures and disappointments. Sometimes a poet will have 5 good poems and use them to get into the class; then when I read 15 other poems for the conference, it’s a shock. Some poems are downright terrible. Other’s work is exciting all the way through, even the poems that need fixing. One aspect of the work I notice is the difference between poems that feel necessary –they have heft and energy and some passion behind them—and poems that are written just to write poems. Many literary zines are full of the latter. Most villanelles are of that variety. Puck is only 14. I fear he is in decline. I have been having trouble sleeping because in the middle of the night I worry about him and try to figure out what to do for him. He is a loving cat, sticks by me day and night. He has been purring a lot, likes all the attention I’m giving him. But the prognostication is not what I want. The other cats are very kind to him. That is not always the case when a cat who had been top cat begins to fail. But my cats are all close to each other. Experts write about how cats are solitary animals, but that has not been my experience. There are cats who would prefer to be the only cat – Efi my Siamese who died this year was that way. But most of my cats have been quite social with each other. When Mingus arrived as a kitten, Sugar Ray accepted him at once and they have been close ever since. At any given moment, any two or three of my four cats will be cuddled together.