How Did Your Pets Get Their Names?

Our dear old yellow and white cat Muffin was, has always been, and still is "just as sweet as a little sugar muffin."

Cookie got her name because the name Muffin was already taken.

Mimosa (who passed away a few days before this last Christmas) - I know y'all think she was named after the mixed drink called a Mimosa, but we lived on Oklahoma when she was born and there grow leguminous trees called Mimosa trees. They are fast growing and have an exotic look about them (as Mimosa did, come to think of it) and bloom out with countless flowers that look something like pom-poms or those big fluffy cosmetic blush brushes, and those flowers smell so sweet I can't even tell you. I'm sure the drink Mimosa was named after those flowers and so was our sweet little Mimosa kitty.

I had a female cat once, named Ramon. Yes I know it's a boy's name, but I'd heard a song on Prairie Home Companion one time a hundred or so years ago,
"Black, black, black is the color of my cat Ramon,
My new white couch is his home...."
sung to the tune of "Black Black Black is the color of my true love's hair." It was so cute that I said right then if I ever got another black cat I would name it Ramon, and I did, even though she was a girl. Could've named her Ramona, but Ramona is a different character all together. Ramon was definitely Ramon. If she'd been Ramona, that is what I would have named her, but.... Maybe I'll name the next qat Ramona (after Ramona Quimby - you Beverly Cleary fans will understand)

Before Ramon I had a black and white Maine Coon Cat named Valentino. Goodness gracious he was pretty. Long haired, black with a white ruff, looked like he was wearing a tuxedo. Nicknamed "Dinks," he was an escape artist who loved to chase birds and just such a bird led him into the path of an oncoming car, breaking all our hearts, may he rest in peace.

Way before that, my first cat (in my adulthood) was a one of those grey and black tabby cats named Casey after a book I'd read called "Casey" about a horse who was infatuated with cats and wanted to be a cat, but since he couldn't be a cat, he took the name Casey, which stood for K.C., which stood for Kitty Cat. My Casey was a pill. Loved to tear around (wherever we lived), climbed curtains and furniture, liked to perch on top of an open door, if you can picture that. Would fetch those cellophane wrapped cigarette packs if you wadded one into a ball and threw it. He would go get them and bring them back as long as you'd throw them. Loved that crinkly sound they made. I haven't thought of that n years, Casey playing fetch.

When Casey got old we got another black and grey tabby cat who resembled Casey (although they were actually quite different) and we named that one "Eikon" (pronounced "Icon") which means "image" since he so resembled or was, as they say in the south, "the spittin' image" of Casey. we called him Ikie for a nickname.

There was a sweet little grey kitty just the color and shading of a soft graphite pencil drawing. We tried to name her Graphite, but my daughter always called her Grake Itty (for "Gray Kitty")

Oh, when I was a toddler, we had a gray and black tabby named Butch. Butch the Cat. Dear old long-suffering Butch - I dressed him up in doll clothes, tried to roll him around in a doll stroller. I really was afraid for Butch because it was plain that he, being a striped cat, was a baby tiger and everybody knows that tigers grow very large and become dangerous and you can't keep grown tigers at home. I fretted mightily, at the tender age of three, that he would grow up and we would have to get rid of him and I hoped upon hope that the zoo would take him. I don't know how Butch got his name.

Bart the Wonder Dog came with his name - at least the "Bart" part.

Benny was named after Benny and the Jets.

Arrow was named partly for the Nilsson song and mostly for the white arrow that ran from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose. Arrow might or might not come when you called him, but he would always if you called Mom. That dude sure loved his Mom (that would be me.) We had Arrow when Isabella was little and she called him Dojjy Ayo - Dojjy for doggy and Ayo for Arrow, so cute.

Lots more to tell about all these guys, but this is all for now.

Publish Post

Gateway to Oz

I had posted my introductory entry to the Yahoo group on Organic Gardening and another member of that group, Jeff FaithWalker, replied saying, "So God is delivering you out of the Hands of us Yankees and sending you to the gateway to Oz is He.......... .hmmmm verrrrrrrrrrry interesting!"

Gateway to Oz - what a great turn of phrase! The idea made me remember the carrots we planted the day of the May 3 Tornadoes:

Some of the best carrots I ever ate were planted on May 3, 1999, a day of a seemingly neverending series of tornadoes.

We had worked a little ash from the woodstove into the row and planted as the darkening sky boiled up from the west. You can keep a garden alive with the water hose, but to really grow, rain is best, so I knew that these carrots having their first watering by rain, I knew that would be good, as long as they didn't wash out. I kept my eye on the sky as the thunder began to rumble and as soon as we got the seeds in the ground I left my dear husband outside to finish putting up the tools and get things closed up and I went inside to look at the weather radar on the TV, see just what was coming, and how soon. Yikes, what a wild ride we had for the rest of the afternoon and most of the night! A whole 'nother story about all that, for sure. But the carrots did great, yes they did. Best carrots I ever ate.

Gardening

I've been interested in growing things my whole life. I remember at the age of four how dismayed I was when my grandparents took out the flower garden next to the house and concreted that space to keep water from seeping into their basement and it always dismays me to hear of someone dismissively removing trees and shrubs simply because they're tired of them.

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to live on an acreage in Central Oklahoma where I had some chickens, a good sized garden with plenty of vegetables and a smaller (but still sizable) garden where we rotated garlic and tomatoes. I made flower jellies from Honey Locust and Dandelion flowers, which I could only do because I knew they had not been chemically treated. Then, seven years ago we moved to a small village in Central New York.

Up here it's two or three zones colder than where I grew up and while I love the cool green summers in Central New York, I haven't quite gotten the knack of growing my familiars in this short, cool growing season. Also, here in the village, my so-called garden is more postage-stamp sized than the all-the-room-you-want garden I had in Oklahoma. I have been able to grow horseradish, chives, mint, lemon balm, parsley, basil, a little bit of garlic - I had a pair of blueberry bushes, too, but we had some work done on the house and I haven't seen the blueberry bushes since the heavy equipment left. As I write, the yard and my tiny rectangle of garden are firmly covered with twelve to eighteen inches of snow.

I thought we'd spend the rest of our lives here, but as it happens, fortune has favored us in that someone has bought our house and we're moving back to Zone 7, to the very acreage we left when we moved up here. I am ecstatic!

I've already researched late season plantings and average frost dates and see that, getting back there in late May or even early June, I can still get several late season plantings going as soon as we get back and be eating some of our own food again by winter.

Onward and upward!