Home is Where the Mayflies Are

Two seconds after walking the first load of luggage into my mom's house I noticed I had a mayfly on my chest. Silent and harmless, they cover everything at home. Right now I count seven clinging to the screens in the windows. One merely needs to exist to attract them.

I'm home for the summer, reacquainting myself with relatives and insects I haven't seen in two years. And birds. Red winged black birds in particular are welcoming. They're smaller than I remembered, but the red stripe on their shoulders is brighter. Sort of a ketchup red. But with a hint of orange.

Speaking of orange, last night I took a ride around the island with my dad and his dog in the dog hair mobile. With the harbor behind us, we rounded the curve towards East Point and I looked at the sun setting between Middle Bass and Gibraltar islands. Pink and orange filled the sky, and the sun melted into the flat lake. It was nice. I didn't even mind the dog smell.

In Grenoble sunsets are impossible. The mountains block the colors. Sunbeams shoot over their crests until simply extinguishing. Beautiful in its own way, it's not a Lake Erie sunset.

On the morning of day two, I woke up at 6:30. The house was quiet, but the birds outside were loud. I had a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. Watching me through the screen door was Mr. Jones, a stray cat my mother feeds. He was sitting patiently and blinked his eyes politely, waiting for something. I saw a bag of catfood and opened the door to the porch. He took a step back and watched as I filled a dish for him.

Mr. Jones is one of dozens of stray cats on the island. Living behind garages or in caves in the woods, eating at backdoors. There used to be a handful of cats behind my mom's house that she passively cared for. All of them were caught, fixed by the vet, and taken to a barn on the West Shore to live. The process was the brainstorm of an island woman. Within 6 months though Mr. Jones came back. He must not have liked life on the kibbutz.

He finished the bowl I set for him, then silently indicated he'd like another. He purred while I poured. His fur was thick, full of burrs and nettles.

When I was a kid we had pet cats. Thomas, Harvey, and Henry were the first. Then Elizabeth. Then came kittens. Rapidly. Every cat we had for thirty years was descended from these first four. Mom would try to get them spayed or neutered before their first heat, but frequently misjudged the passing of time. One cat would get fixed and another would get pregnant. "Yay! Kittens!" we'd scream.

Sometimes though we'd come home from school to discover the kittens were gone. "Where're the kittens?" we'd ask. "Drowned," Mom would say, her voice cruel and dark, as if she'd follow with "now eat your gruel!"

When she was finally better able to get control of the kitten boom, the cats we kept (read: hadn't pawned off on strangers or inhumanely euthenized) were finally fixed, guarenteeing no surprise generations.

Our last cat was Samantha. We named her Sam, until she got pregnant, then it was changed to Samantha. This misdiagnosis of gender was typical and played a major role in our situation. Samantha lived a long time, outliving her kittens and grandkittens. I attribute her longevity for a proclivity to the back yard. Most of our cats died after being hit by cars. Samantha lived long enough to see me enter kindergarten, graduate from high school, finish college, and start my first job in Cleveland.

In the cat's waning years, Mom would curse her. 'I can't replace the carpet until that cat dies,' she'd say. 'As soon as that cat's gone I can replace the scratched wallpaper by the back door.' Frail and blind Samantha ceased to have a name, she merely represented a major roadblock to decorating achievements.

Eventually she died from cat leukemia and Mom got to update the house. The porch and back door Mr. Jones sits at wouldn't be recognized by any of the cats who proceded him. But, in Mr. Jones my mom found a comfortable middle ground. She gets the joy of having a clean, fresh scented home and the daily company of a cat waiting patiently at her back door. Along with the mayflies.