Le sigh.

 my husband decided to favor me by giving me a new shiny google email account, since neither of us is totally  pleased with our current email provider.  This, you understand, is a man who dislikes google intensely (but uses it daily),  to someone who likes it and uses it daily but never wanted an extra email account. 

Now I have one.  Google tends to swoop up everything on your computer, like a giant vacuum,  and when I came back to the computer I found that Google had become my new email of choice for everything, including Blogger.  Mama ain't happy.   And from past experience I know that short of hitting this thing with a sharp stick and a flame thrower, this will be the email of choice listed at the top of the page.  

If you get the urge to email me, the old email works just fine.  We  just won't tell Google. 

Didn't realize how much stress I was under with Toby,  but apparently whether it's a sick cat or a sick person,  if you have the care of them, it drains  you.  I've had almost no energry for anything all winter and spring. Suddenly it's like someone pulled the bag off my head and I can function again.   

We seem to have segued right into March, here.  It's been no warmer than 50 deg.for a week,  amd I've actually had to run the kitchen stove all week to keep the house up to 65 or 70.  Right now it's raining, and the peonies are so pretty in the fog...

The cats among us

 Today was a hard day:  Toby has been getting thinner and weaker, day by day.  I turned the dining room into a place for him, box near the stove,  litter box,  everything.  For the first time in 11 years he let me  pat him,  even to the point of purring.  All winter he slept by the woodstove in his own cardboard box and fluffy blanket.  

Then he started getting weaker and thinner,  and yesterday was the first day I had been able to pick him up, in eleven years.  And today we went to the vet where they gently put him to sleep.  We buried him out in the garden.  

But when I came in and went looking for Charlie,  I found him viewing me with a huge amount of distrust and serious anger.  He'd have nothing to do with me.  I had taken away his only friend, his bonded buddy.  Right now he's hiding somewhere, he'll have nothing to do with any humans.  

Charlie is one of those cats who seems to have one paw in the human world.  It's eerie.  When I came  home some years back from a kidney operation,  that first night I spent on the recliner, because adhesions.  I looked down to see Charlie marching toward me, (he loves sleeping with his human in the recliner) and I thought, oh no...he generally does the cat ballet, washing all of him and part of me, doing that kick-kick-kick thing that they do, just to get comfy.  At least twice.  But this time he just sat, and inspected the human,  and gently climbed up onto a spot just above my knees,  and slept there for six solid hours.  He knew something was different.  He is bloody psychic.  

And I realized that this was his buddy, his bath buddy, the cat that loved to be groomed, and they would curl up with each other.  In his own way, he's grieving.  I grieve with him.

sometimes all it takes is a definite push

 We have had Toby 11 years,  Charlie about ten, give or take.  For most of those 11 years Toby has been the equivalent of a  RoadRunner cartoon, leaving a wake of fear behind him as he vaults out of any room you enter.  This past winter I realized he was not doing well,  and down to a skeleton with fur.  

I wanted to get him to the vet, but he wasn't having any of THAT nonsense, nossir.  So I did the next best thing;  if I couldn't get him to the vet, I could at least make him comfortable.  Big carton with fluffy pillow, right up by the woodstove.  He liked that.  litter box in the corner of the same room.  he approved.  A new kind of food, one of those two flavor crunch and chew things.  He liked that, too.  Over the winter he  progressed from terror to startled exits when I approached the stove.  Then he just Watched Me carefully as I levered wood into it.  Heat=Human with Wood.  Must rethink.   Then he started napping through the entire process, and now and then I could reach down and scratch his ears.   muffled purring.  

Aha, I thought.  

His only reaction now is still toward the sound of the poker.  He leaves.  I  understand now just why he was the way he was.  If I could find the person who hit that cat for any reason...  

And the past few weeks, when I come down in the morning, he actually trots into the kitchen, tail high,  purring.  He spent most of yesterday on the dining room table, on a chair cushion,  not a foot from where I was working.   I don't know how long he has left,  but he's eating, he seems comfortable, and he's getting the attention he never knew he needed.  

I guess that's all anyone can hope for.

Pastel

 

"hope is the thing with feathers", she said

but love is the thing with wings

that keeps it aloft

long after need, or want, or time

has faded the colors

to muted pastels

and the background

has receded into the fog

love is the destination

and hope, the heart

of the migrating  bird

 

The time will come
when you no longer race for the phone
one less  place is set for dinner
and the dog,
accumstomed to sleeping beside the bed
in an unbreakable habit
with paws firmly planted
just where those missing feet
would strike the floor in the morning
now sleeps on the far side of the blanket
keeping it warm
against that moment when the one who left
finally returns

Toby and Sam

 Almost to the day, 11 years ago,  I brought home two shelter cats, a bonded pair.  I was warned that they had been "brought  back"  which was a fair way of warning me that they might not be easy to manage.  I figured they were about 2 years old, maybe more. 

It was obvious within a week or two that they were utterly terrified of us, even though the other cats were okay.  In under a year Sammy had run away once, and then run away again permanently.  Toby stayed.  I never pushed at him, never tried to shove hin into 'loving' me.  He had cat friends here, and would eventually tolerate brushing, and now and then a slow blink from a safe distance.   

When we got Charlie some years later they bonded immediately, and I think that helped. He still had a friend.  This last fall I noticed Toby was beginning to look like a toast rack with fur,  but he refused to be handled enough even to get him into a carrier for the vet.  So I did the next best thing.  I brought down a litter box, and put it in the dining room, got him some new food,  and made up a big carton with squashy pillows in it, next to the stove.  After a few months he realized that the human wasn't going to throw him out, and he stopped running away the minute I entered the room.  Now he sleeps through Loading the Stove,  or even my walking past him.  I reach down  and talk to him and he allows me to pat his head.  Purring.  Two days running and he has come out to the kitchen in the morning with his tail high and purring,  allowing me to actually scratch between his ears and shoulder blades.  

I looked it up, and this  trainwreck of a cat is 13 years old.  I don't expect too much more time with him, I know he's probably on the way out,  but he's warm and fed and comfortable, and he's still got Charlie as  a buddy.  

Unless I find an elderly cat on the doorstep one day, these will be the last cats I have.  It's been a good run;  50 years,  22 cats,  no regrets.

sad coyote

 

This is utterly haunting. She stood there for the longest time, watching me, never moving.  

I wanted to give her treats and a bowl of water  =)

 It's funny, in  a way:  the older we get,  the more the changing of the seasons and the length of the days matters.  We both look forward with vast anticipation to the clocks changing from winter time to summer time,  and  comment on how much longer the days are getting, as if we had a hand in the entire process.   I also have one firm rule, here:  never ever mention the summer solstice and What It Means.   Bringing up the fact that 'now the days will be getting shorter" is not a good thing.    Maybe in September.  Otherwise it's like telling a four year old that Santa died and there will be no more gifts at Christmas.  

The mister has been down on the driveway all this month,  exercising his Bobcat (the tractor not the animal) and cutting up a huge oak that came down last winter.  Looking at the rings, I'd say it's close to 100 years old.  

This is a happy happy man.  =)  

 

prepositional phase

 

where you are right now
between away and to
 
is not where i am
among the  concerned leaves
down along the  hallways
beside and amidst the parted grass
 
there will never be an after
without the before that came before
no here no there
no way around about or through
without me, without you
 
the perhaps of you and I
has been overtaken by the now
 
why doesnt even enter into it
and that will have to wait for spring
 

 

Universal Gesture

 

she stands at the window

cradling a cup of coffee

in both hands 

something in a minor key

playing on the radio

makes her close her eyes

go quiet inside 

takes a sip of coffee

laced with music

outwaits the song again

"We circle in the night and are consumed by fire".

 

we circle in the night around the fire

are consumed by it

even as we take it in, worship it,

admit our need for warmth

for heat, for nourishment

as the fire feeds us

taking and giving in balance

until we come too close

and that which sustained

reaches out

caresses our hair and our skin

like any lover, pulls us in

and we fall, weeping, into the thing we love

becoming the thing we love

at last

Map

Map

Once you know the way--

where the road makes that sharp left turn

at the corner, and rises 

slowly to the crest of the hill

just where that stand of white pine

waits to shelter you 

from the sun, or the weather

once you reach that point

pause, look back, 

see  how far you've come

and know you're almost home

Mouse and Cat

 several years ago we had an influx (to put it gently) of mice in the kitchen.  every drawer, every open space, was visited, and I spent every morning cleaning out every drawer of their calling cards.  brrr. 

 I have two cats.  

charlie is big and fluffy and his idea of hunting is to catch a mouse and lick it to death.  He thinks they are all squeaky toys and when they no longer squeak he abandons them.  Toby is lithe and quick and loves nothing more than mouse in the morning.  I had noticed at the time that his summer quarters in the front bedroom were regularly dotted with mouse carcasses (carcassi?).   Sure enough during the early winter he began catching a mouse a night, and depositing the leftovers (to be polite) on my husband's side of the bed. Gooood  kitty.  We kept track, and by the end of the winter he had taken out 21 mice.  At least.  I found the mouse nest in the closet (don't ask) and closed up the huge holes in the same closet with cement-in-a-sock.  The mouse invasion stopped for several years. 

Charlie and Toby are now senior cats, and Toby is getting to look more like a toast rack with fur, so I moved his bedding into the dining room, near the stove, and his food, and his litter box.  he is now no longer terrified of me,  just a bit wary.  And the mice have returned.  I've taken to putting down serious mouse traps and have bagged at least ten so far.  Expensive, but effective.    This morning I came down stairs and into the dining room to my laptop, set up on the diningroom table.  When I looked down I saw, to my delight, a half mouse, directly where my foot would be when I sat down.

I am assuming that Toby is thanking me for the new place to sleep, and the new food, and this is his way of  giving back.  And I am honored.  =)