telophase | (no subject)

yhlee asked for "something luminous" here, so I blathered on for a while about my mother's house.

My mother lives about five miles out of College Station in Texas, at the end of a mile and a quarter of road, beyond which is a private ranch. The house is set far enough back from the road that in the spring and summer, when the trees' leaves are out, you can't see it at all.

There's lots of wildlife around, and we've had fawns choose to spend the day hiding in the space between the air-conditioning mechanism and the house, and under the car. There are four this year who hang around the house; two sets of twins, apparently, since Mom only ever sees them with two does. If you see a deer outside and stop to watch for a while, you'll eventually see the others fade out of the overgrowth; we've had up to fourteen or so in a herd, in the days before the young males take off on their own. They also like to spend part of the nights lying down in the grassy bar ditch* along the road chewing their cud, maybe because of the coolness of the water in the bottom of the ditch, but the grass is usually so tall in the ditch that as you're driving along the road at night, first you don't see anything, and then you see the tall necks pop up out of the grass like so many Loch Ness monsters.

The rabbits, lizards, armadillos, skunks, possums, and raccoons are also permanent residents of the area, and are frequent targets of the cat, who has brought the occasional small bunny into the house. She never actually manages to kill it, so we have to occasionally fish small, terrified bunnies out from behind the bookshelves. Her second-favorite prey is lots and lots of lizards, many of whom escape both the cat and my mother and die, hiding in the blinds, only to be revealed when you close the blinds as sad, dry corpses clinging tightly to a vinyl slat.

A momma raccoon occasionally sets up her nest in the roof of the well house that is visible from the bathroom window of the master bath, and as the day turns to twilight, you can see them leave to go foraging: the mother coon and three or four miniature versions of herself, which are never as confident climbing down the tree right next to the well house roof as Momma is, and so cling to the trunk for a while and cry until they eventually gather the nerve to descend.

The occasional residents passing through are usually birds. Once two turkey vultures spent the day flapping about the house and perching outside the windows. Another time a red-shouldered hawk decided the area was perfect and hung around in the trees right next to it - this is one big bird. You expect the turkey vultures to be big, even though they're a bit surprising when you realize how big, but the size of the red-shouldered hawk was unexpected. Red-tails also hang around a bit, but they're not as rare as the red-shouldered hawks.

There's a bass tank that we own most of right next to the house, built by creating an earthen dam where a small creek ran, with dewberry vines (and fire ant nests) covering the side of the dam. Turtles and bass live in the tank, and ducks come through and spend a few days there on their migrations, and the occasional heron deigns to stay a day or two on its travels. Dad built a pier (now going to ruin) out on the tank and he loved to go outside at night - the clouds of mosquitos didn't bother him and he never believed me when I complained of the millions of bites I got - and sit on the pier and watch the night go by.

You can see the Milky Way this far out of the city, listen to the bullfrogs, and watch bats zipping over the water. We've seen comets go by, and satellites, and once the space shuttle. We've dragged air mattresses and plastic chaise lounges out onto the yard to watch meteor showers, and I once saw a spectacular green fireball by chance, as I was turning into the driveway and it caught my eye in the east.

But

yhlee asked for something luminous and while all that can be construed as metaphorically luminous, what's really luminous is many times at dusk, just as the tree frogs start singing, or at other times when a storm is imminent, the character of the light outside changes. It reflects off the trees - yaupon, pine, and live oak, mainly, since Mom made Dad rip out all the mesquite near the house because she hates the stuff - and into the house, and all the windows glow with a soft, intense green that makes you suspect darkroom or Photoshop trickery if you see it in a photograph. Sometimes as the sun sets, it fades into a smoky blue, but remains glowing. There's not really anything to do at those times but stand around in the kitchen - the cold white surfaces in the kitchen make the warm glows outside even more luminous - talk about inconsequentialities, and listen to the tree frogs sing.

* Texanism. Speculation as to where the term "bar ditch" comes from here.

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Oh, that's gorgeous! Thank you so much.

I don't think I would go back to live in Texas (seeing as my husband's a Yankee and all), but I miss it and want to go back to visit.

And the poor sad dried lizards...

It's like that here in Indiana, where I live.

Turkey vultures have got to be one of the most graceful birds to watch in flight. They just don't flap their wings. At all. It's just this black shadow among the canopy, and then... a dive when they see good lickin's. There's a half bare tree nearby my parents' house where they'd perch in a small pack, like some rural gang patrolling the turf.

Tree frogs are also very fun to watch and even hold. I was amazed at how content they were just to sit on your thumb and look around. My parents own a hot tub, and, during the spring, hoards of frogs sneak underneath to hide in the lining that covers the pool. We never knew until we started hearing random 'squeals' from underneath the lid. I was brave enough to look underneath, and was surprised by about 10 or more frogs staring back at me.

It sounds positively beautiful where you live. XD I've never been lucky enough to actually see the Milky Way or see shooting stars. You're very lucky. :3

You're welcome. :) I start to get homesick for that, and then I go home and the chiggers bite and the fire ants bite and the weather is hot and muggy enough that you need gills to breathe, and my allergies attack, and there's a spider hatch or a scorpion hatch so that the house either has five or six larger spiders visible along the crack where the ceiling meets the wall, or the cat keeps finding scorpions inside the house and I remember why the hell I left.

That big spider-hatch was amazing - spiderwebs everywhere outside, spiders all voer the house inside - big ones, too. Mom and I resorted to sucking them up with teh vacuum cleaner. Poeple would complain "But spiders are good! They eat other bugs!" Hey! There are SEVERAL HUNDRED in the house! I am going to kill all the visible ones so there! Except for the one that camped out on to of the thermostat. There's a bright green light there, which attracted bugs at night, so she fed well, and she ended up sort of a friend, sitting there on top of the thermostat, coming out after you adjusted it at night, and going back behind it to hide in the morning when you adjusted it again.

The lizards are sad, but ludicrous at the same time, because the cat brings in so many, and they find all sorts of places to crawl into and die. We occasionally manage to catch one that's dehydrated jsut enough to be slow, so you can catch it and put it outside, but lots of times they manage to escape.

I never actually saw the tree frogs out there - didn't actually look, of course, but there were never any visible around the trees right near the house. We occasionally have bullfrogs, too, honking away in the night.

You can read my reply to

yhlee above partly about why I moved away from there. XD It's also that College Station and Bryan, the twin cities there, arne't metropolitan enough for me. I like big city life as well as the country, just not anything in between. I like lying awake at night listening to the tree frogs and hearing the coyotes in the distance - especially in the spring when they have pups and you can hear them yip yip yip yip yip below the howling, but I also like lying awake at night in the city and listening to the traffic and seeing the city lights, and driving on the highway in the wee hours of the morning when it's a ribbon of light from the streetlights and there's very few people out. So I guess ideally I'd like to have an apartment in the city and a house in the country at the same time, only about 30 minutes to an hour apart, so it's pretty easy to go to one or the other. But that's not really happening with my finances and lifestyle. XD

My parents' place in Santa Barbara (an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, also on the ocean) has turkey vultures, coyotes, lizards, and mice. The last two the cats like to bring in and slay; the coyotes cause the cats to be locked in at night so they don't get eaten; and once a turkey vulture flew low enough to convince me that if it really wanted to, it could carry me away.

Mom's cat, for all her mighty saurian-slaying, is a pushover when it comes to anything much bigger than a rabbit. The wounds she's managed to gather from neighborhood cats are all in her hindquarters, as she turns tail and runs. Mom keeps her in at night because we figure that if she gets cornered by a skunk, possum, or coon, it won't go well for her. The coyotes usually don't come into the neighborhood, although we can hear them singing far off.

We once had a mouse nest in the loft over the living room that was discovered after the cat found it and started treating it as her own personal vending machine. She'd go up and get her a mouse at night, then come down and play with it in the hall until I woke up, pulled on Dad's work gloves, and caught the thing and tossed it outside - I was really good at catching mice out there for a while. It escalated, though, to the point where after I did that, if we didn't lock her in Mom's room, she'd go right back upstairs and get her another one, so I had to find it (under a bookcase) and get rid of the mice.

She killed one, once, and was playing with it in Mom's room. I walked in and stood over her and she threw it at me. XD The only other time she killed a rodent it was a rat - she's never brought another one in - and I discovered it when I stepped on its decapitated corpse in front of my door when I got up at 3 AM.

Wow. You wouldn't like Indy, then. XD There's a reason it's called 'a suburb with tall buildings'.

With me, the longer I'm in Indy, the more I miss the country. The air is clearer there (suburb or not, Indy's not a clean city), and the hills are beautiful.

However, like you, I'm kinda caught in between.