This Month's Story

Yesterday I went over to see our neighbors on Aiken Road, Bob and Pat. I wanted to borrow their hatchet. Stella had discovered a large Sago palm that had collapsed in the weeds near Tally’s slab. Prodding me to go over there and investigate, I found about fifty baby Sagos fresh and vibrant sprouting from out of the carcass of the fallen giant.

“Get them, Paul, get them!”

Sure, easy for her to say. I had no gloves to protect me from the sharp barbs and even if I did, the individual plants would be hard to pull loose. Hence, the excuse to visit to Bob and Pat. Soon with their hatchet, I had enough baby Sagos for us, for Bob and Pat and for another neighbor, Alicia, as well. It was a feast of Sagos and that afternoon each family group was planting their share of the windfall.

What I’m getting at here is not so much the trip to get the Sagos, which was a rather pleasant outing, but that in the doing of what we did, Stella and I had an observer: Holly. With every swing of the hatchet, I could see the black form of Holly watching a discrete distance away. Holly gets nervous about any noisy to do, but nosey as he is, he will fix himself in what he considers a safe place and watch. Yesterday was one of those days.

Let me talk a little more about Holly and me and the harshly changed environment we now live in. Holly loves to go for walks, especially in the late evening. At these times, we stay close to the road walking side by side in clear spaces. Our walks during the day are different. These daytime excursions call for me to venture into the tall brush of our neighborhood and to have Holly and I walk close together is not possible. Sure, the bare slabs on the various lots have been mostly cleared and the aspect presented by our once group of eighteen homes is that of a small park. But it is a park not as well manicured as it might be and there is a lot of undergrowth, a lot of undergrowth. So as I walk, I see darting through the brush around me, a distinct black form (he’s color blind, remember, and thinks no one can distinguish his blackness from the surrounding greenery).

But if the truth be known, Holly revels in all this. To Holly it is as if a giant estate had been laid out just for his use and he knows every inch of the broad verdant spaces that we now call home. Perhaps foolishly, I fear no snakes with Holly’s presence and wear my Crocs and loose pair of cargo shorts. Holly ranges and sometimes I hear a sharp truncated squeal and Holly reappears with a rat or mouse dangling from his jaw looking for compliments.

But the beach is different.

Holly refuses to go across the county road to the beach and if I carry him across, he becomes very uncomfortable. He will walk along with me in the grass about the sand fences, but he refuses to go from one fence group to the next. There is a danger there that he alone knows and he refuses to extend himself. It must be the exposed area and the danger of hawks; I don’t really know. But when he stops at the end of the fence line and I find myself walking alone, I concede and turn around and pick him up and walk back across the road to our place.

The other day, I saw Bob and Pat sitting comfortably in chairs on the beach watching the day end and I went over to join them. They were on the beach at the end of Aiken Road and there is a culvert and a lot of clumps of the grass around an old pier. We talked for a bit and then, when I looked idly back toward the road, I detected a movement, a black movement. Holly had followed me.

Later, when the evening grew long and I started back, I reached down and picked up the large lump that I called my cat hidden in a large clump of grass and we went home together.