Mozart's piano concerto no. 9 in E flat is playing in the background. It's his birthday on Tuesday and today I am in a melancholic Mozart mood. Not even the big pot of root soup I made earlier, with turnips, rutabagas, carrots, celery, lima beans, savory, and parsley, has done much to dispel my mood.
In part it's because of the bats. An article a couple of days ago in the local paper said that white-nose syndrome has been discovered in the Pennsylvania bat population. The syndrome has already wiped out populations in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Once the fungus spreads, there's nothing that can be done to counter it. The bats die. Since reading the article, I've been thinking about the bats in the attic here, for decades home to bats. Each year I have to shovel the guano out. It's too depressing to think that our bats and many other Pennsylvania bats may soon be gone.
Another reason for the melancholy was that I read on the homepage of Animals in Distress, a local rescue center, that only one in seven animals adopted as a pet is likely to spend its whole life in its adopted home. In part I was looking at the homepage because of an article in one of the Philadelphia papers this morning about a 76-year-old man who has been living for years in his car. Unable to find a shelter that would take him and his four dogs, he chose to stay homeless with his 'family'. This man has recently been helped to find a home for all, but as more and more people lose their homes, more and more animals too are made homeless.
Again I think of Gandhi's words: "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
