The Feeder

    As my chili simmered on the stove, I mixed the kitty’s formula.  It looks just like Similac and it’s for weaning time.  The dogs were at my feet. (One, shaking because the stove was in operation, and she didn’t appreciate the “tick tick tick FOOM!” that the lighting procedure entailed.) They were looking hopefully up at me because the kitties bowls look exactly like theirs.  I have been mixing scrambled egg in their food lately trying to get Tink to take her meds, so they think that’s what is happening as I stir the kitty mixture.
     I had a carrot on the counter to take to the horse so she won’t like only Richard and not me.
There was a pan of sugar water cooling on the stove for the humming birds that I must feed because they get all mad and dive bomb my head if their feeders are empty.
 I suddenly remembered a story I was assigned to read in high school or college.  As a lit major, I read a LOT of stories, so I’m not sure what the title was but I feel pretty sure that it was Jack London who wrote it as it featured snow and wolves, and somebody freezing to death.  He was all in to that type of thing.
In the story, a woman is the feeder of everything around her.  As I recall she gave of herself unselfishly and the men and animals depended on her. 
One day she is out of food and so she heads out to the local Safeway, no really, she heads out on a long journey, on foot, to get food, because she is the only one savvy enough to go get food and without her everyone would just starve to death. 
While she is on her way home with the meat, there was a blizzard and she froze to death and the wolves ate her, thus she remained a feeder even in death.
And you thought I didn’t retain any part of my education.

I left off the 20-plus hummingbirds that I feed!  That’s actually the species that made me feel most like the feeder woman in the story.  I have five feeders for them and they drink it so fast that I can’t keep up with them.  Furthermore, they buzz my head when I run behind.  (It makes me think of Tom Cruise in Top Gun.)  I am making boiled sugar water everyday.

They are fun to watch, though, and they aren’t a bit afraid of people.  I can sit on my deck, 18 inches away from them.  They bicker at one another and chase each other away from “their” feeder.  I have two hanging outside my bedroom window and I can watch them in the morning while I contemplate getting out of bed.  Funny.  The things that please me now!

    Kitty Cats, too!  They are so much fun to watch that Richard and I have chairs set up to watch them play and pounce on one another.  They practice being Big.  They get up on their hind legs and put their hands in the air and spread their fingers apart, and leap on anything; a toy, a piece of string, a blade of grass, any imagined enemy they can find.  We only let them out of the garage when we are out to watch them, as they look like a delicious owl snack.