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 . . ."