A carillon chimes the hour. The sun gives it a warm shoulder. She always works her own hours. Two deer digest, still except for ear flicks against flies and shifts to identify sounds. Blue-eyed and black faced, a long-haired blond feline assesses the day and listens to a woodpecker beat out a love sonnet on a wooden utility pole. Acorn treasure in mouth, a squirrel flicks a bushy gray tail and trots along a red-brick wall as two black and blue scrub jays hop across the green grass below him. A warm zephyr dries off forehead sweat and whispers close to ear, “Welcome to autumn.”
Comfloofications
Comfloofications (floofinitions) – Ability among animals to pass messages to one another through one or more channels, such as smell, sound, or touch. Note: When done by cats via whiskers, sniffing, and rubbing, comfloofications is often referred to as catmunications.
In use: “People approaching the bush upset the bird guarding her nest. Her comfloofications about an approaching threat caused a digesting deer to stand up and pay close attention.”
Saturday Afternoon at the Cemetery
A couple flirted, giggled, and kissed on a blanket under the cemetery pines while a woman sat on a towel, eating an apple and reading, in a splash of sunshine twenty yards away. Dozens of grave markers from them, a trio of fawns bucked and gamboled. A pair of does ate while a grave majestic buck chewed in thought. A gray squirrel, egged on by cawing crows and jeering jays, chased another squirrel around and up trees and over headstones as a flock of wild turkeys tsked, sighed, and tutted.
It was a lively place to be, in the cemetery that day.
Town Charm
Six deer walked along Siskiyou, and then decided to cross the street and go down Sherman by Safeway. They began across and then paused in the middle, as though confirming their direction. All the traffic stopped and waited for them to make up their mind and move on.
“Only in Ashland,” spectators said.
Yes, it’s part of the town’s charm.
Michael Seidel, writer 