How to make Osprey-themed party decorations with your cat

Next Saturday is the Connecticut Audubon Society Coastal Center at Milford Point's fundraising party to welcome back the Osprey who have returned this spring, as they have for many years, to nest at the marsh. The webcam shows they laid their second egg this week.

So I'm making tissue-paper pom-poms for the party. I am not crafty. I can knit a scarf, in a pretty remedial fashion, and that's all. But there is nothing that can't be learned on YouTube from actual crafty people. I went on there and learned how to make big tissue-paper pom-poms, and I'm planning on doing them in a chocolate-and-white theme to match the color of the Osprey. I settled down to the job this afternoon with Mink, my Burmese cat. I suggest that everyone who is thinking of making Osprey-themed party decorations do so with their cat. It doesn't have to be a Burmese cat, but it helps.

Step 1. Make sure your cat is lying in the sun, because why will she interfere with you when she could just lie in the sun?

Step 2. Lay out 10 sheets of tissue paper.

Step 3. Get the cat off the stack of tissue paper. Have fun with that.

Step 4. Make 1-inch concertina-style folds in the paper.

Your cat will be utterly uninterested in this, as it is the boring "work" part of the task.

Step 5. Tie florist wire around the middle of the concertinaed tissue paper.

Step 6. Be sure to get the florist wire away from the cat before she tries to eat it. A trip to Party City for chocolate-brown cocktail napkins on a Sunday morning is quite fun. A trip to that emergency vet clinic in New Haven where no matter what has happened to your pet, the bill always seems to be around $1800 is not.

Step 7. Cut the ends of the paper in whatever shape you like. I went for a sharp point so that the end result is a bit like a chrysanthemum. This will be too, too tedious for the cat, as what trouble can she get into with a few scraps of tissue paper? Pfft.

Spiky end that I cut into my pom pom.

Step 8. Very carefully tease apart each layer of tissue paper. Tissue paper rips, people. I speak from hard-won
personal experience.

Your cat will really, really want to help with this bit.

Step 9. Sit back and admire the results of your labor. Have a cup of tea, or some kibble.

Connecticut folks, tickets are still available for the Return of the Osprey party, on Saturday, April 21 at 5:30 p.m. Just call Louise Crocco at 203-878-7440 or email her at lcrocco@ctaudubon.org. Not only will there be feasting and the drinking of fine wines, and the holding of silent auctions, there will Osprey-themed pom poms. I may even have gone on YouTube by then to work out a fancy way to fold napkins!

Things I am grateful for today

• Autumn air, which smells of sunshine and dry leaves and dreams deliciously dissolving into memory.
• Seed pods scattered all over the sidewalk, which crunch under your every footstep and crackle in a way that makes you feel like a child again.
• A fish crow making the weirdest mewling sound, so that I looked under a hedge for the kitten that must be there, then around the corner for the mother that must surely be pushing a baby on their afternoon walk, and then finally at the roof line above, and the crow looking down at me, making this soft, plaintive sound.
• Three young yellow-crowned night-herons that swooped into a part of the harbor I have never seen them in before, silent and gray like stealth warplanes.
• Funky Duck, the mind-bending hybrid of mallard and who knows what else, still bobbing around with the mallards as you did all summer, somehow fitting in with them though you are double the size and have those crazy white spectacles.
• An osprey standing in the shallows bathing and drinking as though it were on holiday from the swooping diving flapping fish-snatching hawk life, staying there so long that I began to rehearse in my head the phone call to a wildlife rescue service about this injured, defenseless osprey stuck in Milford harbor.
• The man at the dock who didn't make me feel like a fool when, thinking I was all alone, I laughed out loud as the osprey shook like a dog and took off, then shimmied mid-air, realizing the job of shaking off those droplets wasn't as complete as it had thought -- clumsy and awesome all at once.

Life on my doorstep

There is a park near my house that doesn't look like much at first glance. People walk their dogs through it. People throw trash out their car windows into it. I like it in the summertime when the guys next door play games out there after work; there's something very sane about that. If you look just a little more closely, though, it turns out that this park in suburbia is bursting with little miracles. I walked 15 yards from my door yesterday. There were no birds calling, the park seemed dead. But then a flash of yellow caught my eye. It was a quiet, glowing-daffodil-yellow Wilson's warbler. Within 20 minutes or so, I had also seen . . .

• a northern flicker
• a red-breasted woodpecker
• a hairy woodpecker
• a white-breasted nuthatch, such a cool weird little bird
• a blue-headed vireo
• a flock of juncos
• American robins
• golden-crowned kinglets
• red-winged blackbirds
• common grackles
• fish crows
• white-throated sparrows
• house sparrows
• a savannah sparrow
• black-capped chickadees
• tufted titmice
• scores of pigeons
• double-crested cormorants, including one wheeling through the water going for a fish, looking for all the world like a platypus as it did
• great egrets
• great blue herons
• great black-backed gulls
• herring gulls
• ring-billed gulls
• Canada geese
• mallard ducks, some of the males coming out of eclipse plumage, now gorgeous and iridescent again
• a mute swan, looking alternately evil and elegant, as they do
• and an osprey that I thought was injured and drowning but was merely struggling to get aloft because the fish it had just caught in its talons was almost bigger than its body.

I work alone in front of a computer all day, mostly in silence, and sometimes I find myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of solitude where minute facets of work assume gigantic proportions in my head. A comma. A colon. I inadvertently said something bad in that e-mail, didn't I? Maybe I better read over it again. For the fifth time. That's when I know I should step outside and forget myself for a few minutes, but usually I stay sitting at the desk for an hour more, and then another, as if I'm punishing myself. When I finally go out the front door, it's like lifting a heavy lead helmet from my head. There is sun! And air! I'm surprised all over again by the green out here, right on my doorstep. I had forgotten about life, but huh, it had continued on out here in full bustle. Why can't we remember what's good for us and just do it, every time?

Wilson's Warbler by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, National Geographic, 1917