A true blog post

OK.  I think I am ready to try a true and genuine blog post.

I write this on a windy late December day from our farm in rural Kentucky.  I need to go feed the elder horses lunch soon, since Jennifer is in Lexington, having finished up her radiation and gotten on to running somewhere around 3,000 errands.  (OK -- that's an overstatement.)

I've just heard from Bill Ruddick, husband to Sally Ruddick, who left the planet last March 20.  There is not a day to go by without my missing Sally, or my missing Fran Perrine-Wittcamp, my best friend from high school, who is now over two years gone from us.  How can they no longer be in our lives??  On some level, I adamantly refuse to let them go . . .

Maybe it's the day, the wind, the general restlessness of the weather; but I am reflecting on beloved friends over my break between tending to all the animals we shelter here and I've got to thinking about the cats.

Some of them are old; some young.  All individual and important to us.

We have two coal black cats (Mickey and Blossom) that we saw born over a decade ago.  Their mother, a beautiful grey, was killed by a dog we had taken in as a rescue.  We will never get over losing her. Her name was Marge.

We have another cat (beautiful toroiseshell) who turned up as a wee kitten under the bushes outside our front door -- with a broken jaw.  She is now a porker at somewhere around 15 pounds.

And we have two more -- kittens, we call them, though they are now well over a year old, name Dylan and Dusty.  They are the successors to earlier generations of felines we have loved; some with Jennifer over many years, some with me; so many with us together over the last near quarter century.  And, for some reason, today I am thinking of them all, over all those years, and how they each played their own part in making our household in their times.

This time, I won't go on about the chickens, the horses, or the dogs.  But it is on my mind today that there is a steady stream of passing -- among all these species, as well as our own.  On the one hand, these are like pieces of a living jigsaw puzzle; so, so beautiful and so full of the reality of biological life, waxing and waning.  On the other hand, these are parts of our own lives -- parts of our history.  In our house, we often mark that history by saying things like, "Oh, yes.  That was when Jackie was a kitten."  Or "No, no; remember, Blue was still able to walk then."  Or "Yes! That was around the time that Tosha moved back in after spending a couple of years living in the neighbors' barn."  Or "Spider was still with us then."  The cats, then, quite naturally, give us a way to mark our own passings through.  I wonder if the kittens will think, "Oh yes, that was when Joan could still read and didn't have that limp . . ."

Practicing loading a picture

A picture of Barnegat Lighthouse, on the northern tip of

 Long Beach Island, NJ

taken by my sister, Beth Lamond

Finishing Up Radiation

Tomorrow, Jen has her last radiation. We are so, so happy to be through this.  It has been a long year ..

Jen will go on Jan 3 to have the "hardware" taken out from her shoulder -- put in last March after a mishap on the ski lift that left her with a shattered shoulder.  She's good to go and has done an incredible job of getting through all of this since March 2011.

May 2012 be better . . .

Testing

Just testing my new blog, buddykyblog@blogspot.com.  It seems to work!