love

by

For the Love of Animals

KILLER IS ON DECK

We awoke this morning to find a scrawled note stuffed under the gate that separates the upper from the lower floors of our summer house. An advance warning, it read: “KILLER IS ON DECK”.

note: Killer is on the Deck, M A Clarke Scott, Writer, Blog post

Beware!

I’M PISSED

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would say I was crazy, but I spent the last couple of days dealing with the fallout of one of my cats, Zu, having pissed on the futon sofa at our cottage. Usually (here and at home) it’s on one of the beds. This is not something she does often, but often enough that we have resigned ourselves to covering the beds with a plastic sheet after they are made in the mornings. I have washed enough duvets and mattress covers to last two lifetimes! This new challenge was far worse. When I discovered her “faux pas” I groaned. Would we even be able to save it?

IMG_0806After an initial spray and scrub in the evening, the next day I peeled off the futon’s cotton cover and put it through the wash, then dragged the futon out onto the deck. After some discussion about which cleaners might be most effective, my sister suggested using her new steam cleaner. I thought this was a brilliant idea, as the hot steam would hopefully sterilize, deodorize and annihilate the residual cat piss that had soaked into the fluffy cotton filling. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

I steamed that spot for quite a long while, until all I could smell was clean wet cotton, and then left the futon to dry in the hot, hot sun all afternoon. Unfortunately, though it dried quickly, I felt I could still discern a slight odor. Very slight. Maybe it’s just in my head. But, rather than write off the futon, we replaced the clean cover and put it on upside down, so as to avoid a repeat performance if she detected a familiar smell.

IMG_0804

FELINE PSYCHOLOGY

Not that that is what motivates her. You see, she’s just a little temperamental. Certain things seem to upset her. Sometimes it’s the presence of a strange cat, which there has been a lot of lately. In the first instance, we are sharing the house with family, and although they have separate ‘zones’ our cats and their cousins are aware of each other and have occasional tense encounters. Secondly, there is a neighbour cat with some boundary issues, who insists on climbing the wisteria trellis and invading our house. She just seems to want to visit, but she’s surprisingly stubborn when we chase her away, and returns with fair frequency. If we use any of the usual “feline territorial” behaviors to scare her away, such as hissing, she turns and attacks quite aggressively. Thus her nickname: “Killer Cat” (ref. above note).

But what set Zu off this time was the arrival of my husband, whom she adores, who came to join us for the week. She got fairly excited, one would deduce. She has “issues” with suitcases, and “comings and goings.” These seem to be what sets her off the most, as we’ve had episodes before and after family holidays and business trips in the past. The rest of the time, she’s a lovely, affectionate, mellow cat, who is fairly needy as far as attention goes. She wakes us in the morning with a paw on the face, harasses us playfully if we oversleep, talks a blue streak through the day just to let us know what she’s thinking, and is always game for a hug and a kiss. Okay, a bit of a Prima Donna, really. But she loves us (we have proof!) And we all love her and her sister dearly. We would never for a moment consider getting rid of her.

A LIFETIME COMMITMENT

And yet I know there are plenty of people out there who wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Therefore, there are hundreds and thousands of abandoned pets in our communities, large numbers of whom have to be put down regularly because of abuse or space shortages, often for no greater crime than that they became an inconvenience for their humans. (Speaking of Prima Donnas) And trust me when I say that having a cat pee on your bed is INCONVENIENT. Still. She’s family. When I adopt an animal and bring it home, that’s it. I’m committed for life, no matter what happens. For richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, etc. etc. ’til death do us part. It breaks my heart to see those animals with no homes, no  families and no hope. I want to adopt them all, but of course, we’ve got our hands full.

And I just want to point out that as a designer and an artist, I’m not immune to the appeal of a beautifully appointed home. I love good design, excellent craftsmanship and a well-appointed room as well as the next person. This is one of those things that I’ve just decided to accept. I chalk it up to the virtue “Renunciation” (See my previous post: Living with Chronic Pain). Although I think it’s supposed to refer to renunciation of sensuality, I toss everything to do with the material world into this same basket.

DSCN4809

Zu’s sister Patches. We can’t leave her out!

I adopted my first cat when I was just four years old. My sister (the same one) was walking me home from the local playground, down a little lane. And there, on a humble lean-to, was a sign that said “Free Kittens.” Inside, on a bed of hay, was a mother cat and her litter. A short time later we were heading home, a new black and white pibald kitten tucked into my sister’s shirt. We named her Alexandra, after the street where we found her, beginning a lifelong tradition of naming cats after streets (except for Zu and her sister Patches, but we had a 3-year old then) and a lifelong love affair with cats.

 

IRREPLACEABLE COMPANIONS

Portrait of Zu, photo credit, A Clarke Scott

I cannot imagine a house without a cat. It just wouldn’t be a home. I’ve always had at least one through most of my life, and find that I enjoy their company often more than humans. My cats greet me, delight me and make me feel loved and important no matter what else is happening in my life. They understand intuitively what I need. They entertain me when I’m bored or lonely, comfort me when I’m ill or stressed, console me when I’m sad. They understand, and they know just how to be there and exactly what to offer to make everything better. And it’s not just your imagination. There is now scientific evidence that shows that cats are good for your health. You’d be hard pressed to say that about most people. Or furniture. So, I’ll take the bad with the good. It’s an easy trade-off in my world.

by

Professional Women, Love and Carl Jung

Recently I realized there’s a definite pattern to the books that I’ve been writing. In some ways I suppose it’s obvious, but since it’s quite unintentional, it kind of caught me by surprise.

The female protagonists, and often the males as well, in at least two of my novels, and probably another three that I’ve outlined, are adults in their mid-thirties to early fourties, and who have, for one reason or another, chosen to put their energies into their career at the expense of finding love. Sometimes their single-minded focus on their careers is related to their backstory– something that happened to them in their family of origin or in their youth. Sometimes their avoidance or downplaying of love in their lives is due to their commitment to their career, but often to their backstory as well. Sometimes committment is the issue.

These things tend to get muddled together, and often there are issues characters don’t want to admit to or confront. Personally, I think this makes for interesting values-in-conflict story-telling, just like Randy Ingermanson recently wrote.

When it comes to career, we’re talking about identity. For modern working women, this is a complicated issue. I discuss this a bit in the Essay elsewhere on my website entitled: What is it about romance? I also think that this pattern is not uncommon, and that not all women talk openly about this issue with their friends. Men possibly not at all. For a serious, career-driven woman to admit that she is looking for love seems like a cop-out. It’s something that should “just happen” but never take one’s attention away from the all-important career. It feels like they are pandering to outmoded “fairy tales” from the past. Perhaps today, with internet dating sites, the whole “mate searching” problem has become more open and explicit than it was in my day. Even if women are open about wanting to find love as well as have their career, I think it remains a challenge for modern women to be comfortable with the idea that they place importance on finding true love without feeling like their identity as a professional woman is somehow compromised, or that they will be perceived as not “serious.”

Identity in conflict with a character’s essence is how Michael Hauge talks about the character arc in a plot. It reminds me of Maureen Murdock’s writing in The Heroine’s Journey. It differs significantly from The Hero’s Journey in that for men, there is only the quest. For women, there is both the quest and the hearth–the desire and need to nurture and have a family. Perhaps these two goals have always been in conflict for women through the ages, but the Feminist movement brought it into the light. I happen to think that in these Post-feminist times (and I mean that like Post-Modernism, the Feminism hasn’t gone away, we’re just living in the historical wake of a huge societal change) the challenge is all the greater because each successive generation of women openly discuss the rights we’ve come to expect less and less. So much is taken for granted, that I think individual women often struggle alone to come to terms with these conflicting values without the rhetoric to guide them.

In Murdoch’s view, the Heroine’s Journey is not linear, but rather circular, or perhaps spiral. A woman may begin the journey by rejecting the “mother” and embracing the strong “masculine” role for herself, but she cannot attain her ultimate essence until she takes a little detour down to the underworld of the primal Earth mother, embraces her essential feminine, and returns, having discovered the source of her own power. Only then can she come to terms with her own mother, internalize the strong male and emerge empowered as her true feminine self, as both a “warrior” and a “mother” figure (whether or not she in fact is or becomes a mother). (My sincere apologies to Maureen Murdoch if I’ve completely mangled her ideas in my attempt to distill and condense them here.) This “coming to terms with the essential power of the feminine” brings to mind the re-told stories of Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her Women Who Run with the Wolves. There’s a Jungian link between these two writers, so the connection is no accident. In any event, the journey is a bit more complicated for women. Murdoch suggests that any given woman may be stuck at, or experiencing, a particular place along this path, which raises certain issues and puts particular challenges before our heroine.

This is how I envision my heroines. Depending upon their individual story, I try to keep in mind what challenge they most need in order to take the next step toward their own happy ending, and find a way for that to happen in my stories. You may or may not recognize Murdoch’s Jungian stages in my stories, but they definitely help me trace each of my heroine’s journeys.