Wildlife of Paris

It's spring and just exactly like I would do in Seattle, I buy geraniums and pansies because these are one of the few plants in the plant kingdom that can survive me. Only instead of being overwhelmed by a front yard, a back yard, and all of the pots I didn't manage to fill last year, I only have to fill up the patio.

Ah, the patio that has the cat litter and Kevin's old bike, the one that's in a couple of different piles after he crashed on a ride through the park.

I rip apart the patio, pull out all of the pots and place them in different sections to see how much of the window I can fill up. It's like designing a store front. Then I rip open one of the 2 fifty-pound bags of dirt Kevin has lugged up from the garage. I don't bother to use a shovel or any kind of cup to dig the dirt out. Instead, I cup it out with my hands .... ahhhhh, the feeling of good wet dirt.

I tease the flowers out of their plastic containers. (This must be a worldwide standard. The containers split open just before I pull out the flowers; dirt flings everywhere, just like the ones in the US.) I shovel out more dirt and bury the roots of the flowers.

Mademoiselle Boo Kitty wanders out to help. I imagine her little furry feet as paint brushes, painting my white carpet black when she lingers back into the house. I chase her back inside. (Don't ever have a black cat on a white carpet.)

I plant and plant... until all the pots are full, all the flowers have new homes. When I am done with my creation, I realize that now I have an extra bag of 50 pounds of dirt. I wonder what I will do with this. I mean ... in Seattle I always had an extra bag or two of dirt. I had 1/2 a garage for things like this. You know, the half of the garage that was suppose to contain my car. But in Paris?

I have already turned the extra bathroom into a spare closet. We sleep in a loft so we have a "closet" for the climbing gear. And in my kitchen, you will find the vacuum cleaner rights next to the pantry (goes well with the washer/dryer ... I mean this one appliance that does both your wash and your drying, neither very well I might add!)

Hmmm, I guess I will give the dirt to our maintenance man. He can find a place in the gardens downstairs. Maybe next to the fish pond.... the pond where I often find the neighborhood cats dreaming of the goldfish that hide at the bottom.

Poor fish. They had a real rough winter. Half of them froze in the ice and the other half were trapped in one smaller corner of the pond with the cats swatting at them all evening. The cats stood right on the ice, like they drilled the hole themselves, and had a real feast. (Ice fishing in the winter!)

The other day I came home from work to find ducks in the pond. It's not a very big pond so they seemed a little bit artificial. Like the guardian coaxed them over from across the street, maybe bribed them with a fresh baguette. But the ducks, unlike the cowering goldfish, seem to take no flack from the cats. I guess they got a little tougher in dealing with those mean swans in the pond across the street. I feel like we have the wild kingdom going on. It starts with goldfish, then goes up to the cats. Then the ducks sort of rule the cats, although I think I would call it a toss up really. And then the swans, well they rule just about everybody.

Well, everybody except the BIG dogs. The swans certainly can take out the little dogs. But the cats can take out some of the little dogs and so it's not that easy. We seem to have every variety of small dog you can imagine ... and I am not sure exactly which ones fit where on the food chain.

And the bats don't seem to fit on the food chain at all. They just munch on the bugs in the evening and pretty much steer clear of the rest of the clan.

I laugh ... just where would you put me, Mademoiselle Boo kitty, my geraniums and pansies, and 50 pounds of dirt? I would bet I could take out the ducks, the cats, the goldfish ... but I just don't know about the swans.

Complexity... yes, the wild kingdom ... hello from Paris in spring.