Nature's Place

Time has come to move from Wooyung, soon, back to Brisbane where there is what I need right now. I wonder what to do with the cat that came with the house here. I arranged for someone to take her and then he didn’t show up, yet. A week late usually means no show.

I was just watching her chasing a small water dragon in the garden. Dragons are fast when they need to be and this one was up the mulch mound around the tree and gone at a run. They look funny running, though not to a dragon I’d say. I wonder if the cat could handle being in the town.

Queenie, the name I gave the cat when I got here nearly two years ago, is very comfortable with me now. She always talks to me, says hello and loves the attention I give her. I usually stop to pet her and acknowledge the form and beauty. She enjoys lounging around in the heat of the day, often in the shade outside the wide sliding doors of the living room. She is more mature now, older too, and a far sight from the hungry cat who was abandoned and depressed when I found her.

What to do?

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Plenty to do getting this house ready to hand back. The gutters and water tank filters were next and when I went to the first and easiest filter it was occupied, by a Python, with a tick on it. That will have to wait. Later, as the sun was going down, she was out on the tank top. I say she because it is a small snake, about 2 ½ feet long but the belly was huge as if she’d just eaten the cat – I checked, no. I suspect babies are not too far off now. Another hoard of hungry mouths about and I won’t be here to see it play out.

The gutters had paper wasps squatting so eviction was necessary. There was a massive cellular hive under the electric meter that had to go too, otherwise the reader would have had trouble. Plenty of spiders had their homes demolished. So long as they don’t rebuild before I go I don’t mind. Ran into a few frogs along the way I didn’t know about.

The place is its own little ecosystem and no doubt it will recover from my interference, cleaning up. By the time someone else moves in it will all be back to normal and then it will be too much work for anyone to undo, so they won’t, probably. Wasps a hiving, spiders a weaving, slugs slithering, snakes hunting, mice, birds, frogs, ants singing in harmony. Nideep! And the cockroaches, beetles, earwigs and those little black biters that just showed up and leave a maddening itch so I can’t leave a light on for too long, can’t leave any of them out.

The plants are getting more attention than they have had in a while, arranging, re-potting, transplanting. Some are doing better to be left behind in the ground. We’ll see about the ones that are coming, they will need some lovin.

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And when a day’s work is done? Fresh, ripe, sweet, cold from the fridge mangoes on a hot summer’s day. Aromatic. Heavenly sensation.

© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge