Saturday, February 17, 2007

Reepi...in loving memory

Reepi didn’t seem himself this morning. He looked like he was battling to walk a bit, we noticed this yesterday too, that he was sort of limping. Still sitting up though, and eating little bits during the day. Well, he just got progressively worse and then was battling to breathe, his chest was heaving with the effort. There wasn’t much we could do, so we left him on his cage flap and went to Sally’s for lunch. When we got home he was hanging upside down from the perch, having fallen off but gotten a claw hooked. I don’t know how long he’d been that way, but Nick quickly disentangled him and handed him to me. He was pretty much catatonic and unresponsive, unblinking and still. He flapped his wings a bit when Nick took him down, but he died in my hand. I cried and cried, but I think I’m okay now. The boys are still saying that they feel sad about Reepi dying, but they aren’t tearful. We wrapped him up in his little kitchen towel and buried him in the back garden next to the hibiscus.

When I went for my walk this morning, I skipped my usual Jacob’s Ladder route and instead walked down to the sea, and along the seafront to the left, to where the huge rockpool is. I love the rockpool – the way the water rushes in through two inlets, rising up and swirling over the rocks, a great foamy cauldron of angry soup, and then just as quickly being pulled out again like a giant toilet bowl being flushed. I stayed there for about ten minutes, watching two crabs who were trying to mate, hanging tenaciously on to the rocks as the water tried to pry them off.

In school we transplanted the bean plants into peat pots, with potting soil and pots which were provided in the science kit. They are about 20cm tall now, and had a bit of a pause in growth today with the transplant, but are back on the rise today. There are 8 little plants lined up on the windowsill now in the diningroom, and the bottled garden is there too.

When I went outside to bring in the washing, at about 6.40, the sky was unusually yellowy, so I looked up at the clouds as the sun was catching them, and saw a great rainbow, spanning from the top of a mountain, over the church steeple, and arcing down again. It was so bright! Two minutes later it was pouring with rain, and continued raining for about an hour, off and on.

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