Here’s what wikipee has to say about luna moths, for Margaret and any others who have never seen one. And, if Wikipee is accurate (who knows, the article has citations), lunas only inhabit the eastern half of the continent, so probably my friends who are PacNW natives *haven’t* ever seen one. Actually, I’m trying to think when was the last time *I* saw a luna moth!

I was afraid of luna moths when I was a little kid. Actually, for a kid who wanted to be an Indian chief when she grew up, I was afraid of a LOT of things. One of them was dogs. When I was five, I was so terribly afraid of dogs that The Commander and Grandroobly decided we needed to get one. A stray puppy turned up at a family friend’s house and the parental units went through whatever minimal stray puppy adoption gyrations were in place back in the Jurassic Age (1959) aaannnnnddddd… One day me and a bunch of my loverly cuzzints spent a whole afternoon sitting on the old log pile next to The Old Cabin playing games (“train” was a popular one) and waiting not very patiently for MY DOG to arrive.

I was soooooo excited about getting a DOG. Until she arrived. And then I was totally freaked out! My beautiful puppy was jumping bouncing all over the place! Yeek! I was terrified. Until she went to sleep. She had a box to sleep in and I can still remember my fear of her (and dogs in general) evaporating as Uber Kayak Woman and I watched my new puppy sleep. Tigger.

Okay. So, what next? We had a dog. I wanted a cat too. “Moom, Jimmy’s cat had kittens. Can we have one?” I can still remember her wondering which Jimmy I was talking about and who his family was, yada yada. We did get a beautiful tortoise shell kitten. I named her Twinkle Star. (I also wanted to be Miss America when I grew up.) Why we did not spay her, I do not know. We certainly did that with Tigger. Twinkle had one litter of kittens in our horrible old Michigan basement down on Superior Street. There were four kittens. One was a still-born monster (I didn’t see it). One died within hours of being born (I did see that one — calico, I think). I forget what I named the other two. We managed to find homes for them.

Twinkle had a second litter of kittens at the moomincabin that summer. We knew she was about to give birth because she peed on the floor her water broke. We put her in a big Dewar’s box and the next time we looked in the box, there was a wee little orange tabby kitten in there with her. Butterscotch. I ran like heck down to get the Mullin kids (our parents *must* have been in cahoots about this!) and we all watched four more kittens be born. I named them all but I don’t quite trust my memory at the moment. All five lived and were adopted out.

And, yes, as my cuzzints commented yesterday, my wondrous dog Tigger was *very* protective of those kittens. I don’t exactly remember her fending off the mama cat but she definitely would not let anyone else near the kittens.

We had Tigger until the parents put her to sleep at the age of 13. The Commander didn’t really get along with the cat that well. After that second batch of kittens, she gave Twinkle away to someone with a farm. As much as I loved Twinkle, I don’t remember being very upset about that. I think even I could see that we could not run a kitten factory around here.

The elegant baby in the photooo is my first baby, who is a grown-up now and occasionally comments here as Isa. She is about nine months old in that photooo and she is being compared to an elegant fish caught by our old friend Boult, dead too many years now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 4th, 2011 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.