Beautiful, Brutal Nature

There’s a pond in front of the house I live in. Surrounding the pond are bushes, scrub, spindly trees, and grasses. When the bushes and trees bloom, there is privacy for geese to lay eggs and rabbits to lay bunnies. You can’t see the nests; they’re well-hidden.

My dog, Duke, knows they’re there, though. Several weeks ago, he pulled hard on his leash and dashed into the brush and ran down to the pond. I pulled him out, but it was too late. He immediately sat down on the grass. He then opened his mouth and slowly, slowly, a giant goose egg emerged. He dropped it on the grass and batted it around with his paws.

When Duke is eating or playing with something, it is unwise to try to take it from him. Instinctively, he will bite you. Hard. I know I should have had this trait trained out of him. I bought a shock collar to discourage his bad behavior. It’s still in the box. I can’t bring myself to inflict pain on him (I’m aware of the irony), so I just don’t take anything away from him. And I tell others not to, either.

But, back to the goose egg: Somehow, I was able to distract him and while he was looking away from the egg, I grabbed it and headed into the thicket. I located the nest, which appeared to have been constructed primarily out of dryer lint, quite easily since the two geese in the pond were nearby, screeching their heads off. I quickly placed the egg back into the nest and got out of there.

After that, the mother never left her nest. She sat there all day, every day, protecting her young. She must have left the nest at some point, but only when she was certain that Duke was not around. The eggs hatched last night or this morning, because I saw the eggs yesterday afternoon in the nest, and today I saw the mother and father geese swimming with their little goslings in the pond. I was happy they survived.

The same couldn’t be said for a nest of newly born baby bunnies, however.

Yesterday, on our walk around the pond, Duke pulled especially hard on his leash and dragged me back into the brush, a little further down from the goose nest. I pulled and pulled and finally got him out of the brush. As he emerged, I saw numerous tiny little newborn rabbits scramble away from him, racing in all directions across the lawn. He raced after them, pulling me with him. He scooped up two or three in his mouth and would not release them. I screamed and yelled and demanded that he drop them, to no avail. His jaw was clenched tightly. Little limbs hung from his mouth. Horrified doesn’t even come close to describing how I felt. There was nothing I could do as he swallowed them whole.

I was afraid of him for a while. This is the same dog I hug and snuggle with. He’s a 140-pound gentle giant … when he isn’t biting off your hand or eating live animals. It’s hard to reconcile his two natures.

My niece, who was visiting, asked how he could behave in such a vicious way. She noticed that he looked quite happy and normal right after eating the rabbits. I told her that it’s instinctive to him to capture prey.

“But, he’s a house dog!” she responded. Yes, he’s a house dog. But he’s also descended from wolves.

I’ll have to keep that in mind on our next walk around the pond.

The Case of the Missing Eggplants

I was so proud of my garden this year. I had managed to grow eggplants, which I’ve never been able to do in the past.

This summer, I had at least 20 eggplants growing on two plants. They were small and didn’t seem to be getting any bigger so, a few days ago, I fed them plant food and waited.

Today, I went to check on them … and they were gone. One-hundred-percent missing. There wasn’t a trace of them. It was as if they had never existed.

Do eggplants regularly disappear? That would explain why I could never grow them. Maybe, in past years, they were there before I saw them and had vanished by the time I started looking for them.

Their giant leaves still exist, though. Only the eggplants are gone. We don’t have deer, just rabbits and squirrels. But even if they ate them, there’d be evidence, e.g., partly eaten eggplants lying all over the ground.

This is very perplexing. But, then again, so is my zucchini situation.

Everyone who grows zucchini says that they’re overwhelmed by the abundance of their harvest. I grew two zucchini. Two. I have several enormous plants that look very healthy but they don’t have any zucchini growing from them now that I picked the two that grew. I’m beginning to wonder if my zucchini disappeared, too.

My strawberries vanish regularly, but I blame that on birds. But I can’t blame birds for everything. Eggplants and zucchini wouldn’t fit in bird beaks, unless they were vulture beaks. I haven’t seen any vultures in my garden, though. If I did, I would have certainly taken a picture.

Speaking of pictures, I should have taken some of my eggplants—just to prove that they did exist and that I didn’t dream that I grew them.

The line between my real life and my dream life has been getting blurry lately.

Bye Bye

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(Note to Grammar Purists: The plural of eggplant can be eggplant or eggplants. I didn’t understand the rule regarding when to use the former and when to use the latter, so I chose to use “eggplants” at every mention. Zucchini is the plural of zucchini.)

 

On Beauty, Slugs, and Homeopathy

Today, while cutting flowers in my garden, I found a pale green inchworm on a peony and I was thrilled. Later in the day, a rabbit ran across my lawn and again I was delighted. If I had seen a slug on the peony and a rat on my lawn, however, my reactions would have been very different. I wonder if there’s a parallel universe where slugs and rats are preferable to inchworms and rabbits?

I often think about why some animals are preferred to others—why we recoil from some, eat others, and keep certain ones as pets. I have also pondered beauty. We’ve all heard that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and I’ve witnessed this many times. One person will think a celebrity is beautiful while another will disagree. But neither of those people would call the celebrity ugly; well, they might, to make a point, but they wouldn’t truly mean it. They would actually mean that the celebrity doesn’t meet their criteria for beauty. What one person perceives as human beauty does not always mesh with the opinion of others. It might be due to one preferring blondes to brunettes, or brunettes to redheads. It could be related to what a person was raised to believe was beautiful. So why doesn’t anyone prefer a slug to an inchworm? Or a rat to a rabbit?

Speaking of nature, the other day, or maybe a few weeks ago, when I was driving to who-knows-where, I heard a radio ad for a homeopathic natural supplement that improves one’s short-term memory within 60 minutes. I wish I recalled the name of it, but I hadn’t taken the supplement, so just knowing about it did me no good. The ad got me thinking, though. In the recent past, whenever I heard the word, “homeopathic,” I would think of natural remedies. However, I looked the word up not long ago and learned that homeopathic remedies, if given to a healthy person, would cause symptoms of the disease that sick people are trying to get rid of. My brain shorted out when I read that. If people knew what homeopathic meant, I doubt they’d brag to their friends that they only used homeopathic drugs. I would venture to say that many people think homeopathic remedies are natural remedies. And anything natural is good, right?

Socrates might disagree with you. He was sentenced to commit suicide by drinking hemlock, a poisonous plant. There are plenty of poisonous plants found in nature. I would think that the perfect murder would involve giving someone a freshly brewed cup of hemlock that one grew in one’s garden alongside tea leaves. Persuading a jury that you mixed up the plants would be a cinch. This makes me wonder why our society looks on natural remedies with such a favorable eye. The medical profession is aware that certain herbs and supplements can be detrimental if taken willy-nilly or in tandem with prescribed medicines. Even grapefruit juice can interfere with certain medicines, and what’s more natural than grapefruit?

Today, I was filling pots with soil and my friend called. When I told her I was gardening, she asked me if I had lost my mind since I had already contracted ivy poisoning twice this year and it was only May. The outbreaks were severe and required heavy doses of Prednisone. I reassured her that my gardening endeavors today were pot-related. She thought that it was interesting that I was growing marijuana and asked me to tell her where the plants were located.

While this exchange was in jest—take note FBI— it also made me think about the beneficial plants in nature. Just as with beauty, opinion varies. I love string beans, but my husband doesn’t. My inlaws salivate over broccoli rabe while I would use it as a poison, in place of hemlock. Certain fruits and vegetables are universally appreciated like apples, bananas, oranges, lemons, tomatoes, lettuce, and potatoes. Others, like lychee, prickly pears, plantains, rhubarb, beets, rutabagas, turnips, and spinach are as much disliked as liked. The same goes for marijuana. Some don’t like it and some do—especially when they’re stoned. What’s not to like when one is stoned? Hell, even broccoli rabe is appealing. (Not that I would know this from experience, law-enforcement agents.)

So, we’re back where we started: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, except when it comes to slugs and rats. Although, I’m sure some will disagree with that statement. To them I say, “How’s the weather in your parallel universe?”