Love Is All You Knit

One of the things I missed most while living in NYC was nature.  I will always love and miss the busy-ness and energy of living in such a city, but there is something about being surrounded by beautiful plants and trees or looking skyward to catch a glimpse of a bird in flight that makes me feel centered and peaceful.  Our little house in Texas is surrounded by plenty of trees and plants that are home to many different animals and I get such a kick out of spying on them from my windows.

I’ve mentioned our bunnies before (rabbits, actually) and Joey and I continue to keep tabs on them and their goings on.  We don’t have a vegetable garden (though I dream of someday having one), so the abundance of rabbits in our area is more of a joy than a bother.  I may have even bought a bag of rabbit food to leave out for them on occasion.  I’m not putting out so much food that they will come to rely on it, but just enough to get a few extra fluffy cottontail glimpses every now and then.

We also have lots of birds that make their home in the trees and bushes that surround our neighborhood.  There is a cardinal pair that we see almost every day, chirping happily to each other as they flit from branch to branch.  And Joey recently brought my attention to a dove and her two babies, who have been flapping around in our bushes lately.  I decided to put out a bird feeder to further entice these feathered creatures to enjoy our area, and since then I have seen daily visits from the cardinals, and even spotted a woodpecker!

I initially hung the feeder from my back porch and within 20 minutes I was getting a few interested visitors.  By the second day the feeder had already been emptied, with a huge mess of seeds having been tossed out onto my porch.  I knew it must have been a squirrel, as no bird could have had the strength to completely knock over the feeder and create such a mess.  I even spotted the culprit in a nearby tree, waiting for me to refill the feeder one rainy day.

I’ve since moved the feeder to our front porch just outside our picture window, thinking it may be slightly harder for the squirrels to reach it as it hangs far from the edge of our roof.  Not that they haven’t been trying, though.  I came home the other day to find that they’ve overturned a small potted cactus and completely strewn potting soil (and birdseed) all over our porch.  I righted the cactus only to find it overturned and further trampled the very next day.

The last straw came this week when I came home to find that my little cactus-sproutling, the very one I had been so enamored with a few weeks ago had been mangled by what I can only assume were those crazy ass squirrels.  I usually enjoy a good squirrel scamper, but I’m so sad that they attacked my little cactus!