Until this year, our two cats, Paco, 16, and Fifo, 12, did a credible job of keeping wild critters, particularly mice and rats, out of the house.This week, though, we discovered they'd surrendered their hunting badges. It may be Paco's old age or Fifo increasing rotundity and laziness, but when we spotted a small mouse …
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Honey forecast: Lousy, reasons unknown
All outward signs pointed toward a bumper harvest of honey—good rains; nice cover of flowers, both wild and planted; mild temperatures—but for some reason we got only a fraction of the usual production this year.The number of monarch butterflies and their more exotic cousins also seemed to be sharply down. The only bumper crop this …
On Thanksgiving morning
Gratitude comes easily when everything in our lives is hunky-dory which, unfortunately, doesn't happen very often and when it does, it is usually but for a fleeting moment.Rather, we reflexively tend to look forward or backward, or right or left, and get distracted by the reality of a sick friend, a sore back, something we …
The Water Lady will see you now
Looking like a piece that had broken off the International Space Station, a decrepit well-digging rig landed about a kilometer away from our ranch a month ago, launching yet another episode of the tragicomic novela about our community's water supply.Who's sinking the new well, huh? And does he/she have a permit from the local or state …
The 'winner' of the sex scandal sweepstakes
For the past eighteen months, going back to the final heat of the presidential election, Americans have nearly drowned in a tsunami of sleaze, with perpetrators and victims trading accusations, alibis, explanations, revelations, legal maneuvers and lurid details.Perhaps the only moment of clarity came yesterday when comedian Louis C.K., actually admitted that the accusations against …
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A small moment of grace
Someone once told me that "grace" is not some dramatic, God-driven event with angels with trumpets marking the occasion, but rather an unexpected moment of joy or revelation.I had one of those moments last Easter when my friend Anita emerged from her small and chaotic kitchen in San Antonio with a ham and all the …
Tooling about in a slightly odd Italian machine
When we went on a solo driving tour of Italy a couple of weeks ago, Mother Hertz unexpectedly let us borrow a nifty black Alfa Romeo Q4 Giulia Veloce for ten days. Before you start having fantasies about Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren vrooming about on the Italian Riviera in a Alfa Romeo convertible, their Gucci …
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A case of puppy love
Each of our five dogs has its own sad-sack story and that's why they joined our household. We're buddies. Ellie is an orange, short-haired something-or-other with a broad head and face somewhat reminiscent of a pit bull except she is small and weighs only about twenty pounds. Her most distinctive traits are her bowed rear legs and …
When Santa Clara came marching in, followed by her cats
The lives of the saints bear close scrutiny—or none at allHagiographies are tough to fact-check: Religious fervor and the fact most saints lived hundreds if not thousands of years ago conspire against definite answers.And so it is, I found, with Santa Clara (St. Clare in English), who lived nearly eight hundred years ago in Assisi, Italy, …
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When grasshoppers came to dinner
How do you maintain your ecological witswhen Mother Nature turns on you? We returned home after a couple of weeks traveling and Félix reported everything was fine, except for a not-so-minor detail: Our ranch is under attack by an overnight blitzkrieg of thousands, hundreds of thousands—millions for I all know—of chapulines or grasshoppers.I went out this …
El Rancho Santa Clara 