Jar of Goodness 9.11.22: New Roof!

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for our new roof!

Yayayayay! Premier Property Services put on our new roof on Wednesday, September 7!

It was thrilling just to see the materials arrive in our driveway the day before.

The team of workers arrived around 6:30 in the morning and were working by about 7. They took lunch from noon to 1, and then they kept working until dark—around 8 p.m. They were nearly done.

They came back the next day, again around 6:30, to finish the persnickety little rooflets above the front door and above the garage doors. Ta-da!

They still have to do the gutters and the new siding for front and back dormers, but those are different crews, and at least the roof is done.

Yayyyyyyyyy!!!!

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Note, 10-15-22: though this post is for September 11, 2022, which was the day we celebrated, I’m actually uploading it on October 15, which is why the photos all look like autumn—I took all the pictures today! And no, we still haven’t gotten the new gutters or siding, which is why the gutters and siding look the same as they have for years. And we still haven’t opened that bottle of champagne we got for our “roof is finished” celebration.

Also, a little backstory: Our previous roof was put on by a gang of riff raff in May 2006. The company’s name rhymed with "Narco," we realized in hindsight. The company disappeared from Missouri within a year.

Seriously, it took them four days to do the roof, and the owner’s son finally came and yelled at them to finish it the hell up. They used oceans of silicone caulk. The owner’s son came and beat on our door the evening they supposedly finished and demanded payment. “Now.” Yes, we made complaints to the BBB, but that did nothing. The BBB wanted us to let them back on our roof to "make it right." By that time, we needed them to stay far away from us and our property.

Here's a picture of the awful roofers from 2006:

The crew in 2006 were awful, and in retrospect, we were genuinely traumatized. This has set the tone for our home improvements: we are scared to hire anyone to do anything, simple as that.

So yeah, two weeks later, in 2006, we had a big rain, the front gutter overflowed, and we had water in our basement. Also within a month, shingles were falling off our back dormer and more. In 2010, we needed to get the sunporch roof replaced (March 1) thanks to ice/water shield not having been installed. We also had to have the sunporch ceiling replaced (June), since water had leaked in so badly.

So, in a nutshell, ever since 2006, we have been skeptical of our roof’s soundness and angry to have been taken in by those crumbs. Now that we have a new roof, installed by a good company with sober workers, we feel much, much better.

Sunporch Screens

Well, it was about time! Now that we’re having an entire week of 90-plus temperatures, you’d think we would have changed them sooner.

Taking out the storm windows and putting in the screens: This is the easy part! This year, it barely registered a “2” on the cussometer.

The hard part is in fall: attaching the windows on the hooks, not un-attaching them (usually). To get them on the hooks, you have to position the window angled outward and lifted up, just so. And you can’t see it very well. And the storm windows are much heavier than the screens, yet more fragile. So the screens are easier. Lots easier.

And when we’re done, it’s so nice! All that fresh air, and nice breezes. Lois can look out the screens and sniff the air, and watch the birds. It’s so much more interesting with the screens in, like being in a treehouse.

Why the heck did we wait until the middle of June to do this?

Ohhhh it’s a long story. Here are our excuses. First, in April we decided to wait a few weeks because of all the pollen. Man, it was pretty bad again this year. Even Sue was suffering. In previous years, I’ve been able to write my name in the coating of yellow pollen that covers the table and chairs out there. So it just stays cleaner, and the air quality is better, to keep keep the storm windows up through pollen season.

And then we got rains here and there. And the windows are wood. The sunporch frames are wood, too. When it’s damp, it all swells up just enough to make a serious, 5- to 7-degree difference in the cussometer rating, so we’ve learned to wait a few days after the rain is gone to do this procedure. And as it happened, our occasional dry storm-window “windows” never happened at a time when it was convenient for us.

And finally, we’ve spent a lot of time enjoying the backyard, when the weather’s nice, so we haven’t been on the porch much to miss the screens.

Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

We got the screen windows up. Hooray!

Our House of Blue Lights

Gosh, we’ve had a hot summer, with plenty of bugs. Odgen Nash, as usual, hit the nail right on the head: “In this fairly temperate clime / Summertime is itchy time. . . . Beneath the orange August moon / Overfed mosquitoes croon. / After sun-up, flies and midges / Raise on people bumps and ridges.”

But as the weather seems to be getting cooler, I’m hoping we’ll also have breezes enough to push aside some of the insects while also making it more pleasant to be outdoors in general. So we’ll be spending more time on our patio. (Such as it is.)

I’ve mentioned our little oasis in Central Missouri before (like when I wrote about playing the zither or our guitars out there), but today I’m frankly just crowing about our outdoor lighting, which I’m so proud of.

Sue and I were recently sitting out there, playing our guitars, and Sue mentioned that we have “The House of Blue Lights.” She hummed a few bars, and I was like, “What song is this?” She said, “Don’t you know that song?” So we had to Google it, and I learned a new song. And I got a title for this blog post! . . . Here.

I started the lighting project in 2018. I basically copied an idea from Kansas City’s Cafe Trio (yeah, one of my happy places). (And yeah, you should really go there and check it out.) That restaurant has a deck/patio with an attractive view overlooking the iconic Nichols Memorial Fountain and looking beyond toward the KC Plaza. I was fortunately able to be there alone one night and noticed the lighting.

They had gobs of those bright, cold LED Christmas lights overhead—enough to cast a cool, cobalt-blue glow over the entire patio. So that people could see (and read the menu and stuff)—but also to create a compelling visual contrast—they also had regular warm-colored patio lights overhead, too. The warm and cool lights combined to produce interesting reddish or even purplish hues where they intersected.

Then—and here they were really inspired—they had a number of rotating LED projecting spotlights (you know, the kind that people use to beam rotating snowflakes onto their homes at Christmas) mounted overhead, too, facing down onto the bar, the chairs, the floor, everything. Because it beamed down from above, it wasn’t in anyone’s eyes. And it wasn’t snowflakes, though—it was just blue revolving and rotating splotches of color. The lights overlapped a bit, so there was no discernible pattern. The overall effect was like being underwater.

I took note of the idea.

I started with the screened-in part of our sunporch. While Sue was out of town for a while, I did it all unilaterally. I put a super-blue LED light bulb into our overhead fixture, and it emits enough glow for that small portion of the porch. Then, I copied Cafe Trio’s method, stringing plain patio lights overhead and rigging our rotating LED projector so it would beam down onto the table and the rest of the room. We don’t use it for Christmas decorations anymore! And it has a little remote control, so I can change the colors a bit: blue, red, green, or combinations of the three. (It looks best when it’s set on all-blue.)

I was so pleased with the effect, I extended it to the backyard patio area. I found a LED blue spotlight for above the steps (you can still see to get up and down them, but it’s blue now). I purchased a bunch of plastic blue LED stringlights and hung them in the lower portion of the canopy of our big yew tree that overlooks part of our patio area.

Next, I strung regular patio lights from our downstairs back door along the walkway to the patio area. I was proud of myself for using some plant hooks for those. . . . And we already had our tiki torches, and the firepit.

We still really miss Vines, but even when it was still open, there were many nights when we had opted to stay in our own little private oasis in our backyard. Hopefully, now that the weather’s starting to get nice again (with, I pray, a corresponding decrease in itchy bugs), we’ll be out there again.

Our Musical Opossum

Every once in a while, I’ll awaken in the night to hear Grandma’s windchimes* dinging and donging far in excess of what any current breezes might naturally cause.

I came to the conclusion that it must be a “critter” out there on the handrail at the top of our back porch steps. We have had raccoons, opossums, and half-feral cats perch, at times, on that wooden railing. The long, metal tubes of the windchimes stretch down from the soffit nearly all the way to the railing.



Maybe critters view the windchimes as a possible way to access the roof of our house. Like an incredibly noisy, hard-to-grasp rope ladder. Maybe that’s the attraction.



Anyway, we finally caught ol’ “Tuffy”** in the act a few nights ago. Sorry, there are no pictures—I’ll have to paint it for you with words.

It was well after dark. We were sitting on the sofa on the sunporch, reading Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley to each other—and that clanging started up. It was not particularly windy, but the chimes were dinging and donging so vigorously that it might have been someone swishing his hand among the pipes: Ding-dong-dinga-donga-ding-dong-ding-ding-donga-dong!!

“Sue! Shh! Let’s see what’s out there!”

We snuck up quietly to the door between sun and screen porches—unlocked it carefully—swung it open—and caught “Tuffy” red-handed!



No joke: He (or she) was on his back haunches, with his arms upraised, “playing” the windchimes with his little pink opossum hands as if he were stroking the strings of a harp.

Dinga-dong-dinga-donga-ding-dong-ding-donga-ding!!

He quickly sensed we were watching him and immediately withdrew to a crouching pose, still perched on the railing. He turned his head to face us, nose-down, unblinking, in that way they do—like they’re looking over their eyeglasses. You know—that opossum deadpan expression that always seems to sigh: “Seriously? Surely you are not going to make me have to run away—are you? Come on . . . seriously??”

We retreated quietly back into the sunporch, closed the door between us, and “Tuffy” likewise retreated silently down the back porch steps.

A half hour later, it occurred to me that we had an extra apple we’d acquired during our recent trip to northern Ohio. A mini-Cortland, ooh-la-la. I placed it at the top step, in case “Tuffy” returned.

Musicians should be paid for their efforts, I believe.

No, we don’t make a habit of putting food out right by our back door for the opossums. But just this once, I did.

About 4:30 the next morning, I again awoke to “dinga-donga-ding-dong-dinga-donga!” By the time I arose, the apple was gone.

And that’s the story—so far—of “our musical opossum.”



* Realize that I’m compelled to call them “Grandma’s windchimes,” because from my perspective they were “always” here at Grandma’s house, and seemed an extension of her personality. One could always hear them dingle-donging just outside the bathroom window, or while sitting out on the sunporch. When we bought the house, we saw no reason to take them down or move them. Like so much else at our house that we technically own, I feel like I’m just a “caretaker.”

** We call every opossum “Tuffy.” We just do.

Cussometer Reading: Only a "2"!

Wednesday, when my folks were visiting, I asked Dad to help me with the worst storm window of the bunch: the big one on the back porch. I told you about this process last year. Remember? The storm windows out there on the screen porch were salvaged from steamboats by my great-grandpa.

Click here to refresh your memory; there are pictures and everything.

Man, that storm window is heavy. It must weigh about thirty-five or forty pounds. It's about three feet high and five and a half feet wide. Real wood and real glass--yeah--and it's that old-fashioned, warbledy glass from history.




Every year we've lived here, getting that thing in and out--but especially in--has been a pain. It always sticks on one side, and we have often sanded or even planed that edge to get it to fit.

Worse, we usually have a hell of a time getting it to go on both hooks at once. It's a two-person job at best. The bottom part must be held far out beyond the side of the house in order to get the top part on the hooks. Then, the bottom part is pulled inside and locked in place with more hooks.

It's heavy enough that you want to use both arms to hold the bottom edge of the storm. What, then, do you use to move the top part into position on the hooks? Your head? I have actually tried that. (And no, it doesn't work.)

The dialogue usually begins like this:

Person A: Okay . . . I think it's hooked on my side . . . how about yours?

Person B: Nope, I can't get it on. We need to push it out and try again.

(Pushing, lifting, grunting noises; squeaking of metal hooks.)

Person B: Okay, it's hooked on my side. Are you on on yours?

Person A: No, it slipped off and now I can't get it to go on. We've got to lift it out again.

(More pushing, lifting, and grunting; squeaking of metal hooks.)

Person A: Okay, I think it's on on my side . . .

Person B: Dang it! Now it won't fit on my hook again.

(More pushing, lifting, and grunting, etc.)

Person A (or B, take your pick; whichever person represents ME): Okay--hang on--I've got to rest a second, my arms are getting tired . . .

Let the cussing commence. If there's a Person C, he or she stands in the yard, watching. The job of Person C is to let Persons A and B know if the window is actually hooked or not. That knowledge is reassuring when it's time to haul the bottom inward, usually with some real force, since it always sticks.

So even if you can manage to get it on both hooks at once, you sometimes still can't get the window to fit into place. It's at this point that we've unhooked the window, lugged it completely back inside, and run down to the basement for the sandpaper and planer. . . . Then, to start all over again.




For years, now, Sue and I have been rating each fall's back-porch storm-window experience on a scale of 1 to 10 on the "cussometer." Most years, it's about a 7 or 8. Some years, it's been a 9--especially if we're trying to do it after a rain, when the wood swells and makes for a particularly tight fit.

. . . So Wednesday, Dad and I put up that blasted storm window, while Mom reported on our progress from down in the yard.

And--what happened? What did we do? I had been dreading the whole operation--but it was actually very easy this time. Yes, it took us a few tries to get it hooked, but it wasn't very bad.

And then, when we pulled it inward, at first it seemed hopelessly stuck in the usual place; then Dad did something--what??--to the top, on his side, and whoosh! It slid right into place. Did he lift it? Did he push it outward a little right there? He says he doesn't know--he had accidentally gotten his fingers caught at the bottom and was pushing it outward in order to free his hand--and then--

Wow! What did we do?? Was it because I had parted my hair differently that day? Was it the shoes we had on? Was it that I had just drank a Diet Dr. Pepper? --I mean, What??




Ta-dahhh!! It was only about a 2 on the cussometer this year!

I was almost afraid to tell Sue about it that evening; I was afraid she'd feel gypped out of the one easy time we had with the storm window. I wish she could have seen it, because I don't think she completely believes me!

Trepidation; Elation

I feel like I’ve fallen behind in posting, but then I do realize that the only expectations here are my own. It’s my blog; I can do what I want with it. Somehow, though, I feel like it’s gotten away from me. My posts are feeling like articles or research papers, instead of, say, the real thoughts in my head.

For about three decades, now, I’ve kept a journal, so writing about my day, my thoughts, my “here is where I am right now,” is indeed the only form of writing I feel truly qualified to attempt; thus so much of my blog here is a tangent, a lark.

I honestly don’t know nuthin’ about cooking—I’ve never even taken a basic home ec class. I don’t know nuthin’ about science—I defer all definitive statements to the specialists. I’m not an authority on Missouri: I grew up here; I left; I came back. But I always feel woefully lacking in an understanding of its history and landscapes. As for Jefferson City, I am a total fraud: I come from across the river, from the rival town and ultra-rival school. I only decided to start learning about this place when I moved here a decade ago. I’m a Columbian, by birth and by culture—that means I’ll never really be accepted here.

But I do know how to tell you what’s going on right now. I’m sitting on our recently repaired sunporch, and the late-afternoon sun is slicing in. Patches, the original Opulent Opossum, is lying in the middle of the soft new carpet, on her back, her hind legs in the air, snoozing as only she can do.

It’s one of those early cool days in September, when the pleasant north breeze is still a surprise, because you’re still expecting the Missouri summertime steam bath. It will take several more days like this before our bodies begin to accept that autumn is really here.

Well, it seems that way to me.

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Here’s the big news today: We said goodbye to two elderly, beat-up chairs and a sofa. But it’s only temporary—when we see them again, around the end of October (I understand), they will be transformed into elegant, fine furniture fit for high society: We’re getting them reupholstered (and repaired, and refinished).

Here’s the history: The sofa is the one Grandma S always had in her living room . . . well, until Aunt Minnie got sick and moved in with Grandma, and her (nicer) sofa was placed into the living room. Grandma’s older sofa, more beat up, was demoted to the sunporch, where it’s been since Aunt Minnie got sick—when was that? The late seventies?

Here’s a picture of Aunt Min sitting on Grandma’s sofa; back in the good ol’ days. Christmas ’75, I think.




Hmmm. I’ve always liked the old sofa—good memories, good vibes.




And one of the chairs—a “wingback” chair with nice soft arms—had long been my favorite place to sit when visiting Grandma. The fabric was a satiny damask, soft and cool, and I don’t know . . . just comfortable. When it was time to sit down and talk, I’d make a beeline for that chair.

Please understand that I’m not insane with nostalgia; when Grandma died and auctioneers were brought in to tote away everything that could possibly be valuable enough to sell—and my parents and uncles and aunts encouraged us to keep the stuff we wanted—I held back.




It’s a difficult social calculation: Would I appear greedy if I prevented something valuable from being sold and adding to the estate, just because I “want” it? If I let something be sold that really should be kept in the family for the next generation, then am I being blind, or callous? Would I appear greedy if I held on to such a thing, for that reason?

We kept things that seemed heirloom-ish, like the china cabinet, like the table. We kept some furniture and other objects just because we knew we would use them.

Understand: when they sell stuff at estate auctions, most of it goes for very cheap, sadly cheap; I couldn’t feel very guilty for keeping things that might sell for twenty dollars, for which I would have to spend a hundred to replace.




Anyway, there was another category of Grandma’s old possessions: Ones that the auctioneer rolled his eyes at and explained were worthless. The sofa and two old chairs we’re having reupholstered fit into this category. “They’re not even worth carting away.”




They were in sad shape. Poor old sofa; it will have to be disassembled and put back together. The chairs, pretty much, too. Our upholsterer helped me to feel better about it: Never were these pieces of furniture abused—they were simply worn out. Fabric ages; springs push through their bindings. It happens after, oh, several decades of use.

Yes, it will cost us some money. We’ve already purchased the fabric, which of course is no cheap thing right there. And the fabric for the sofa came from a store in St. Louis—so you can add the cost of travel to the expenses.




But I think we’ve been showered with luck, if my instincts and this fellow’s estimate are correct. We had gotten an estimate for the chairs a few years ago, and the prices from that fellow were completely beyond what we could pay. We were heartbroken; the sofa, of course, would have been impossible, if the chairs were already far too high.

We threw a big canvas sheet over the sofa, to hide its thousand imperfections. And the chairs sat in the basement. We considered putting the chairs out by the side of the road, so they could dematerialize, one way that many household items find “new homes” here in Jeff.

But I couldn’t bear to do it. You might as well have asked me to leave a box of kittens by a busy highway.

Then, earlier this year, a chance conversation with an acquaintance introduced this new fellow, who is supposed to do fabulous work and have surprisingly low rates.

I finally got around to calling him; he came over, prepared an estimate for us, told us how much fabric to buy, told us he wouldn’t be able to start until early September. And meanwhile, it has taken us this time to select and procure the fabrics—which brought us to today.

Of course, it is more complicated that that—we had to disassemble one wall of our screened porch in order to get the sofa out of the house and down the back porch steps. And you know that kind of thing is easier said than done.

But we did it, and we got it all put back (need to touch up some paint now—one thing leads to another). And so here I sit, looking at this room without the sofa. So strange.

I’m slightly fearful—what if this upholsterer is horrible? What if we’re appalled, and then still have to pay for the work? We’ll be kicking ourselves: Should have checked references! Should have asked to see some of his work!

. . . But sometimes you just trust. My friend said he does good work; and the price was indeed very doable for us. For the cost of buying a fine new sofa and two fine new chairs, we are resuscitating some of my favorite furniture in the world, with fabrics that do them justice, fabrics I’m in love with.

Yes, there’s some trepidation—but there’s also anticipation. I think we’re going to be very pleased in another month and a half.

Reassembling the Sunporch

Yesterday, I told you about our success in restoring the old ceiling light fixture out on the back sunporch. And one thing leads to another: Having that light fixture back in place meant that we could finally put the clattery shell windchimes back.




I suspect these windchimes were a gift from my Uncle Tom, who lived for several years in Florida.

These windchimes have been on the sunporch for about as long as I can remember, and without them, the sunporch seemed eerily quiet. Indeed, the rustling clatter of those windchimes is the official soundtrack for the sunporch.

They give voice to the breezes that make the sunporch such a nice place to be.

For the grand occasion of their reinstallation, I gave the windchimes a thorough cleaning. (Yeah, they were filthy.)




And to top everything off—metaphorically only, of course—we found a new carpet for the room. We lucked into a nice big (perfect-sized!) remnant over at Scruggs—with a color and pattern we actually liked! Scruggs got the edges bound for us, and ta-dahhh!




Pretty nice, huh? And best of all, very affordable. Affordable = good!

Then, having the new carpet in place, we could move the old china cabinet and all its contents back into its customary position.




This necessitated a lot of very careful dishwashing!






We still have a bit more work to do out there, but we’re on track to have the porch completely “resurrected” by the time we get nice weather this fall.

And then, we’ll simply be living out there.

More Sunporch Progress

You might not think this is big news, but it is a small triumph for us!

When we got the new ceiling for our damaged sunporch, we had to have the old light fixture disconnected temporarily—but when we had an electrician out to reconnect it, he examined the fixture’s wiring and shook his head: “I could put this up for you, but I really don’t think you should use it—see how broken the insulation is on these wires? . . . And these black marks on the ceramic, here—?”

He was right. The wiring on the sockets wasn’t safe anymore—especially not after the remodeling guys had removed the ceiling around it, and it was dangling from its wires.




Then they snipped it down completely when they hung the drywall.




I asked the electrician if he could replace the sockets within the fixture; he poked at it and couldn’t tell how the sockets were connected to the fixture, so he couldn’t see how to remove them, much less replace them. —Heck.




So we “sat on it” for a while; we looked at various antique lighting places online, checked at stores to see if there were any “new” fixtures we could tolerate. Again: Heck.

Think, think, think . . .

We finally bought some miscellaneous, cheap, basic fixtures and sockets at Lowe’s, brought them home, and started fiddling around.




We discovered how to remove the old sockets from the fixture—they had been painted in place by the original manufacturer, but once the paint seal was broken, and using a pliers, we found we could unscrew the thin metal wrapping around the original cardboard insulating cylinder.




And glory-be! One of the new plastic socket types we found fit almost perfectly—but these lacked the threading and were too loose to stay in place. . . . Hmm.

How to get the new plastic sockets to be firmly attached to the antique fixture?

Uncle Richard to the rescue! He was visiting us one night, and we showed him our project. He turned the fixture over in his hands, then abruptly said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. I know exactly how to take care of it. Let me take it home.”

A few days later, he had it all done—he’d used liquid weld on it, and the sockets are indeed firmly in place. Perfect!




Then, a quick visit from the electrician the next afternoon, and voilà: The old light fixture lives again!

Which is good, because we have identical light fixtures for several other rooms of our house! In addition to the ones in the bedrooms and hallways, we even have about half dozen of them in a box, left over from the eighties when Grandma had a couple ceiling fans and other fixtures installed.




As with most old electrical wiring, such as all the knob-and-tube within the walls and ceilings of our house, the wiring is pretty okay as long as you don’t mess with it and break the brittle old insulation—which is what we did in this case.

Anyway, now that they’re outfitted with these new sockets, I think the old light fixtures are good for at least another seventy-five years, which is far more than we’ll need them. Hooray!

* (Thank you, Uncle Richard!) *

Gray Catbird: Sunporch Soundtrack

We’ve been having some fantastic days here—it’s been in the 70s, with a nice breeze and low humidity. We’ve got all the windows open. I love how this old house catches the breezes, up on this hill and with so many good windows. What a nice day!




I spent a few hours the other morning painting on the walls of the sunporch. We picked a light fresh green—an extremely pale version of the color “lime.” . . . And I was sipping coffee.

Man, that breeze was nice, coming through those banks of windows. In the summer, Grandma used to practically live on the sunporch. (No air-conditioning!) I predict we’ll have a lot of pleasant time spent out there this fall. It is going to be like a completely new room. And I’m thrilled with the ceiling—I think the guys did a good job. You would never know there had been a huge gaping hole in the ceiling.




By the way, if you’re local, it’s M.S.V. Exteriors that did the work; Shaun Vanover is the owner. They actually specialize in exteriors (hence the name), siding, decks, covered porches, remodeling, and room additions, but they did a wonderful job on our “little” project of replacing our poor ol’ water-damaged plaster ceiling. Yes, I’m recommending them. They did a great job, exceeded our expectations.

. . . Okay, so I was out there on the sunporch, which feels like a treehouse because of all the windows, and I was so pleased with the new ceiling, and painting that creamy green back and forth along the baseboards, with the breeze blowing in.




And there’s been a pair of catbirds hanging out in our yard the past few weeks—are you familiar with them? They are rather hard to spot. They are often secretive—they hide in the middle of a bush or a densely foliaged tree. They don’t even like to fly through open areas. And yes, they’re gray. (The spiffy black cap and rusty crissum aren’t immediately apparent in the brief glimpses you get of this bird.) But a catbird’s presence is abundantly obvious when he’s singing.




Catbirds are in the Mimidae, the same family with mockingbirds and thrashers, a family of mimics. I read that the male catbird can have a song that lasts for ten minutes.

Unlike mockingbirds, which repeat their mocked phrases 3–6 times, the catbirds don’t repeat a mocked song at all. A mockingbird goes, “tewdydoo, tewdydoo, tewdydoo; tooka-tooka-tooka-tooka; tee-doo, tee-doo, tee-doo, tee-doo; beedle-dee, beedle-dee, beedle-dee . . .” But the catbird will sit there and gurgle out: "tewdedoo, tooka, tee-doo, beedle-dee, teechurr, cheweep, cheeew, twitter-itter, chewee, cheerio, squeeeder-eep . . .” with no discernable rhyme or reason. Compared to the mockingbird’s chanting repetitions, the catbird scats out improvised nonsense, like twelve-tone, high-modernist music—melodious, but with no melody.




Indeed, my beloved old copy of Birds of America (ed. T. Gilbert Pearson, New York: Garden City Books, 1936) has this quaint, naively politically incorrect way of describing the chattery whistles of the catbird: “Somebody has said that the Catbird ‘sings Chinese,’ which is rather clever, since there is a certain resemblance between his erratic potpourri and the queer half-musical, half-gutteral ups and downs of the Celestial’s speech.”

(Is that an offensive, racist comparison? I have to say that there is something to it, since Chinese, which has its own unique melodious quality, does sound like strange music to the ear of a native English speaker. This is not a stretch, and it’s not particularly insensitive. For example, a Chinese American friend of mine, who speaks no Chinese, described his own grandmother’s language as “gibberish.” And he meant no offense by it, either; it was simply an honest assessment of the hopelessness of their language barrier.)




But back to the catbird. After saying that the catbird “sings Chinese,” the same book emphasizes the musicality of the bird’s voice: “It is undoubtedly one of the most interesting of bird utterances, and usually contains many melodious phrases as well as piquant musical flourishes. In it one may hear reproduced the characteristic tones of the flute, piccolo, and clarionet, as well as the violin and even the higher tones of the cello” (3:178–79).




But wait! There’s more—the “meows,” which the catbird is named for. After (or amid) all that pretty whistling, the bird often utters a raspy, nasal, smeary “meeeew,” which sounds amazingly like a cat. It’s almost too much to believe.




Birds of America lists several birds whose voices are accurately mimicked by the catbird, then quotes a Mr. Matthews, who said that among these birdsongs, “the yowl of the cat is thrown in any where, the gutteral remarks of the frog are repeated without the slightest deference to good taste or appropriateness, and the harsh squawk of the old hen, or the chirp of the lost chicken, is always added in some malapropos manner. All is grist which comes to the Catbird’s musical mill, and all is ground out according to the bird’s own way of thinking” (3:179).

I mean, if we’re going to be “all sensitive,” we might as well point out here that we are making a huge aesthetic value judgment when we say that mimicked bird whistles are mellifluous and the voice of a cat is a “yowl” that is not in “good taste.” Why isn’t a cat’s voice beautiful? Who’s to say?




Remember when I told you about finding a typewritten speech that my grandma had made? Well, she talks about catbirds in it, too. Here’s what she had to say:

The Catbird is slim, lithe, elegant and dainty, a sort of Beau Brummel, in smooth, gray feathers who has preened and prinked until his toilet is quite faultless. He is among the first to discover the bird bath that we have set in our yard, and he is not too squeamish—in spite of his fine appearance—to drink from his bath. He delights us with the sweetest of songs, not loud like the Brown Thrasher’s, but similar, only it is more exquisitely finished and rippling. The next minute, though, you feel like stopping your ears when he utters the disagreeable cat call that has given him his name.

Yeah, Grandma didn’t think very highly of cats . . . but she did make a point of defending catbirds. Her speech continues:

He has a keen appetite for so many pests of the garden and orchard: moths, grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, spiders, flies and other insects, that his friendship is worth cultivating. Five Catbirds, whose diet was carefully watched by scientific men in Washington, ate 30 grasshoppers each for one meal. How many people ignorantly abuse the Catbird! Because he has the good taste to like strawberries and cherries as well as we do, is he to be condemned on that account? If he kills insects for us every waking hour from April to October, is he not entitled to a little fruit in June? A good way to protect our strawberries and cherries from Catbirds, Mockingbirds and Robins is to provide fruit that they like much better: red mulberry. A mulberry tree in the yard is a popular restaurant.

Grandma had a big mulberry tree in the backyard. It’s long gone now, but its progeny still come up as immortal weeds all over the place. Their roots go clear down to . . . China, I do believe. (Too lazy and toxin-phobic to grab the Round-Up, we nip them off at ground level several times a year.)




. . . Anyway, I was thinking of all this stuff while I was painting in that big, empty room with the open windows, enjoying the air, while Mr. Catbird was attending our yard, singing from the depths of one tree and then another; his chattering, “Chinese” melody was my sunporch soundtrack.




Okay, you’ve read this far: Now for a little game! This is to give you an idea of how hard it is to see catbirds when they’re hiding deep in the trees: How many pictures in this post actually include a catbird in them?