It’s not really Dragonwood’s first ground-coating snow of the season… but we missed the first one, being away on visits.  So it’s OUR first snow, and it didn’t arrive until after Christmas!

So, to celebrate my morning walk with birds and cats, here are the first snow footprints that I found this morning:

1. Unknown polydactyl cat print, front foot, five toes across the front.  Non-polydactyl cats normally have five toes on the front paw, but arranged as four across the pad and one behind, as a dew claw.  Gina and a couple other kitties here have five toes on the front, but arranged straight across the top like this one.

2. Sassy (aka Sasquatch), who came running through the snow to see me.  On the bottom is her front paw print, with seven toes, and on the top is her back paw, which has five toes (non-polys have four in the back).  It’s harder to see the fifth claw and matching pad, but they’re on the left of the main print and other toes.

Sassy has 24 toes altogether, tied for our local record holder.  You can only see six toes/claws on her front paw print here, arranged with four across the front and two out on a “thumb” (to the left, since this is her right paw)… the seventh claw has no pad, and grows neatly between the thumb-pair and the four-pad above, and curls under (rarely leaving a mark).

Also… Sassy seldom retracts her claws, and we’ve never known her to do so while she walks.  Normally cats retract their claws, leaving a distinctly different pawprint (like #1 above) from their friends like dogs and raccoons (always show claws in their prints).  But Sassy walks on her claws, whether in the snow or on our hardwood floors… you can always hear her click clacking along in the night.

3. The turkey.  Our Tom greets me every morning, and on a morning like this it’s easy to see where he’s been exploring before I get out to greet him in return.  Tom is now 2-1/2 years old.

I shoulda shot the chicken prints too, I suppose.  And the juncos flitting around the kitchen garden’s remains.  But this isn’t a documentary, it’s a celebration.  It snowed!  Yay!

Sorry, it’s just been so long since I posted anything at all, that I thought I’d just post this photo I took this morning with my new phone.  The morning sun on the sage caught my eye, and since the best camera is the one you have with you, you get to see what I saw.  The chickens had to wait a couple minutes more to get out to pasture, but them’s the breaks.  You don’t get much from this tiny view… click through to see it bigger (along with the spotty beetle adding color).

It’s not consolation, but taking the photo and posting it helps a little with something else I had to do this morning.  Boy George died last night, and I buried him this morning.  He was a wonderful friend, and I miss him.  I’ll repost this photo of him, as a little memorial to the way he loved to curl up with you. Sniff.

Goodbye, Boy.

We spent most of yesterday in the gardens, digging out grasses, planting out lettuces, readying other beds for more of the same. Two tables in the living room are taken up with sprouts under grow lights, and the porch overflows. Conservatively Mandy has 5000 plants growing in pots and/or already planted out.

It is so nice now to be eating fresh greens every day, and sometimes at two meals a day already. Fried eggs on a bed of baby greens, mmmm.

Coldframe littuces getting some fresh air. Missing ones in the middle have been planted out in the new bed, top left.

Two days ago I found Mandy planting out some rows of 3-4″ tall deer’s tongue lettuce… I didn’t recognize them from the sprouts she’d been growing. Instead, these had been planted as seed last fall outside and then covered with a cold frame… a small garden spot about 3′ by 3′ with a hay bale back end, bricks and hay sides, and a south-facing 50-year old wooden window frame to make a tiny greenhouse. All winter the lettuces sat there mulling things over, and in the past two months of slow spring they came out of hibernation. Now they’re so crowded that she took out just two handfuls and filled rows of lettuce sprouts ready to grow big and strong.

And much more to do in the garden.  Mmmmm.  Recently we’ve been doing a lot, as is our wont in April, weather and circumstances permitting.

Red, red newbarb.

There’s rhubarb to discover under the leaves, to expose and (for some of them) to cover under ceramic pots.  We get nice long juicy stalks with less energy going into making big big leaves.  The first of the season though (the newbarbs) are just so red and beautiful and luscious.  Rhubarb custard does not last long around here.  Very nice with coffee for first breakfast (before the eggs and greens).

Last week, not in our gardens but a few steps away in the hens’ free-range territory, I found a patch of white tucked away in the barbs of the black raspberry patch.  We hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, a nice patch of Bloodroot flowers.  I haven’t tried breaking off a stem to see the reddish juices inside.  They’re just too nice.  And the hens have completely ignored them, it seems to me.  They might know something I don’t about bloodroot’s flavor (or perhaps the aftereffects).

And finally, inside, we find Sassy expressing her innermost desire for the high diving board.  Nearly every day she finds a comfy spot and assumes a near-10 quality tuck position in her sleep, dreaming of her splash-free pool entry at the bottom.  May we all have such dreams to tuck into as we sleep.

Diver cat, tuck position.

I’m ready to see some green.  The other night while I was starting some more seeds and caring for those that have already emerged, I glanced up at the kitty keeping me company and realized her eyes were the same green tone as the young celery.  Worthy of a quick pic, a quick post, a quick share of a sneak peek at spring!

So I’m sitting in the half-dark working at the computer.  It’s early, it’s cold, but the woodstove is starting to heat the room up.

Go-Go-Girl has found a 1″ wooden ball somewhere (where do these cat toys appear from??) and it is careening wildly across the wood floor.  She loves soccer, so across the room like a shot it goes with Go-Go-GO!-Girl right behind it.  Back and forth with pauses to lick some part that needs it.  Into the kitchen.  Back into the dining room.  Background music as I compute.

Suddenly as the ball flies by under my feet, out of the darkness by the bookshelf comes “Hisssssssssss!”  It’s F-Cat, lashing out as Go-Go-Girl flashes past.  I had no idea F-Cat was there, and I jumped.

Meanwhile Go-Go loses the ball behind the woodpile next to the stove.  So I retrieve it, and send it back out into the playing field.  But this time F-Cat tackles the ball on the fly and starts her more gentle and controlled dribbling, moving the ball in careful slalom around the rocking chair, a perfect practice drill.  Go-Go watches from the sidelines.  F-Cat tires of this quickly though, and mews to leave the room into quieter colder parts of the house.  I wait a bit, then let her go.

Go-Go collects the ball again, pauses, and she’s off again, into her fictional World Cup championship game against imaginary also-rans.  Then a pause (paws?) in the noise behind me.  My body tenses.  Waiting… waiting… suddenly it’s a full speed sprint across the floor and … but there’s no ball.  Go-Go changes fantasies and leaps instead for the bay windowsill to watch the early birds arriving at the bird feeder outside.  Active playtime turns to passive Cat TV time.  Sigh.  Mornings with cats.  Time for another cup of coffee. Then it’ll be time for morning with chickens.

It was inevitable, following my reprehensible actions. Late last week I expressed dismay (? well, at least disbelief) that I had not once this winter shoveled our driveway. It was very shortly thereafter that the first inklings of the latest (last night’s) snowstorm started to hit the weather predictions. Then over the weekend I found opportunity again, and repeated my proclamation, thus sealing today’s “snow day” for schools all over the midwest, and adding another X inches of in the east and northeast today. To all who feel inconvenienced by my actions, I apologize. To those who get out and enjoy this snow, You’re Welcome!

I was up last night around 2am, helping Mandy get out the door and on the road, in the middle of the snowfall. Actually, near the end. We already had 8-10″ on the ground and only a couple more inches fell after that. It was beautiful outside, and the snow was perfect powder, light and fluffy… a joy to shovel, or even to sweep.

my winter friend Tippy

This morning though, it was worktime. After coffee and some early emails, I headed outside with water and feed for the chickens. First I shoveled out to the west flock (not so far) and shoveled out a circular path for them in their yard. Then I invited them out and sprinkled scratch grains all along the circular drive… half of them joined me. Changed water, collected eggs, added feed, chatted up the peeps (6 little ones, three months old, have their own little corral in the coop) and headed back to restock.

Tippy joined me then, stretching as he came out of the garage… the other cats (Caprica 6, Georgina and Sassy - our three polydactyls) had been across at the east flock last night, so I hadn’t expected to see anyone this morning here. Tippy rides my shoulder all winter long whenever he’s around, and he mewed to jump up.

As we trudged across to the east flock through the drifts (not quite knee high), I found I was following Tippy’s footpath. Obviously it was the footpath we use every day, but the 6″ of snow that had fallen since yesterday’s trip to close up the east flock and the blowing powder should have obliterated the path… but here it was, freshly marked by Tippyprints only partially reclaimed by the drifts.

Tippy's trackway, 10" powder

O Intrepid Cat! O Noisome Traveler! (I could say noisy, but sometimes this field cat is more noisome than noisy). After following his path, I could see that he went from the east coop barn overnight, over to the nearby garage, then back to the usual path and over to find me. He had leapt through the deepest snow in several places, but mostly trudged through the powder dragging his belly. I was proud of him then. He is a fine companion cat for the out of doors.

The chickens are all fine this morning. I used my boots to scuffle out a smaller circlepath for the east flock and scattered their scratch grains outside too. The roosters deigned to join the hens this morning, as seems their fair-weather prerogative. But everyone seemed happy. And I was too.

Caprica 6, our polydactyl (”Hemingway”) cat, had two kittens about 3 1/2 weeks ago. She moved them five times. They were born outdoors somewhere, then moved into the garage at 5 days, then moved outdoors outside the garage, then far away in another outdoor location, then back into the garage again last night.

Caprica shows off her extra digits

Caprica is an enigma. We don’t know where she came from. She appeared early this spring as a pregnant seemingly-teenage mother, completely feral but apparently starved enough to approach humans. We fed her well, but she lost her litter, probably not able to make milk or care for them in the condition she was in. Slowly, over the summer, she gained weight, warmed to us, and finally allowed us to begin to pet her a little bit. She never loses her nervousness entirely. On the day that we were first able to really pet her while she was lying down, we noticed that on each front paw, one of her extra toes had grown a terrifically long and horrible claw that curved around and pierced the skin between her toes, because it doesn’t wear normally. Her own claws were growing into her foot. We wrapped her up in a towel and trimmed them. We noticed the next day, and ever since, that she meowed differently - she used to yowl with each meow, and now she doesn’t so much.

Wild creature of the forest

Polydactyl cats have extra toes! Ernest Hemingway’s house grounds was, and continues to be, home to polydactyl cats, thus the nickname Hemingway Cats. It’s a genetic propensity that Caprica has passed to her two kittens. In fact, one of them has more toes than she does!

“I have HOW many extra toes on my feet??!”

You can find out more about polydactyls here. And at this informative site, too.

This is George Raider Hamilton Clooney Fat Boy the Third. He’s the biggest baby of our cattery, always lounging, ever running from fights or confrontations with other males, always ready for a scratch on the belly. George likes to lounge in the chicken yard where he can be near the chickens. The Delaware hens sometimes will come up and peck him lightly, to see if he’s food, and George just accepts that as a part of life at Dragonwood. They are the same age, George and the Delawares, to within a few weeks, coming up on their first birthdays later this spring.

George has the most perfectly coifed fur on the farm. It has a nice mixture of colors, with just a hint of gray that gave him the Clooney/Hamilton parts of his name. The “Raider” part was his original name, after he gave us one of these looks (in the photo) and it reminded us of the evil or not so evil after all Cylon Raider starfighters in BSG. Fat Boy was added later, as he grew into his skeleton. There’s no hint of evil in him these days, despite this look, just pure kitten playfulness, laziness, gluttony and Georgeness.