On Epic Journeys and Cats' Condescension

I've been absent. Conspicuously so.  But only because things are afoot. This is my tenure-application year; I'm sunk in research and stranded on a Mt. Grademore of unprecedentedly massive proportions; in February D finally moved home from Hawaii and we drove an un-snow-tired UHaul from Maryland up to blizzard-shocked Nova Scotia; and a couple of weeks ago we got cats​, so now we are those people who can't do anything but chirp devotedly about the miracle of feline disdain.  

Courtesy of XKCD

But I've been storing up tales to tell, in snippets and asides, and I hope to dole them out in semi-narrative form here now, so that you can see what I've been up to of late.  Hopefully once the term ends (next week: no joke), I'll be able to weave blogging more seamlessly into the daily pattern of course-prep and frenzied research.  ​

​Meanwhile, to returns and rediscoveries!

I saw a creature wandering the Way...

There may be those who think I've been exaggerating, not to say mythologizing, Farfara Way, which is, after all, only our *driveway*, no matter how long or steep. To them I give this tale:

Yesterday morning, as I was driving my white-knuckled route down the Way, I saw something odd across the deep ditch that abuts it, a few metres into the woods. That evening when I came home from work, I stopped the Barge at the midway point of the drive, where it is at its steepest, and went off to investigate in the frozen, pitchy dark. The spectre was a package, wrapped thoroughly in plastic, and tied to a tree at shoulder height. The delivery guy had hiked halfway up the driveway, and found himself UNABLE TO GO ON. So he went into the woods, and secured the package where he hoped I might someday find it. 

I half expected to find his frozen body at the base of the tree, with a note saying he'd eaten his companions in the hope of surviving the long Canadian winter.

Linear Reading: A Tale of Gore

"Oh, how charming," I said to myself as I emerged from the house this morning, "Some woodland creature's been frolicking in the snow outside my door!"

As I slipped down the long, long driveway, I followed the creature's tracks backwards in time, as they lengthened to a loping run, and then became two sets of tracks, forming a wild double helix of a chase. One veered off blithely into the woods, followed by another, bolder and more sinister. Prowling.

"Oh, god," I revised, gripping the wheel as I made my perilous, distracted way down the icy road towards the beginning of the tale, "It wasn't a frolic. It was a woodland MEMENTO, one creature dragging another off bodily into the woods by my front door."