Winter

The dark, cold nights lengthen and gain strength. 

The tall black oaks have wept their last, brittle brown tears, creating a winter blanket for the rich, red-brown earth. These leaves crunch under foot. Under mine, and the deer, and the squirrels. 

Winter is coming and the woods are going to sleep.

From my kitchen window I savor the newly exposed expanse of azure sky. But my garden also sleeps. It looks like death with its broken branches and colorless remains. Most of the little creatures who found nectar and seeds and insects during the summer have gone. 

But for those who remain, who need to get through this winter as much as I do, I offer a little support. I wrap up in a warm coat and slip on shoes and toss a handful or two of birdseed on the pathway. Bread crusts, and fruit - gone bad because I can't eat it quickly enough - get cut up and tossed there, too.  

The deer know my voice now. I talk to them as I work at the kitchen sink. What exquisite hearing they have, with those big ears that turn independently of each other, one pointing to the woods behind and the other pointing towards me, in the window. Who knew that deer absolutely love nectarines, even if they are on the mushy side?

Every day or two I pull on my barn boots and fill a cart with wood from the shed. The rambling rooms of Sanctuary cannot stay truly warm without a good fire in the wood stove during the long winter nights.  A few days ago I found blood on the little window sill where Domino likes to sit and watch the world outside. I discovered sores on the pads of two paws. He had jumped onto the wood stove while a fire was burning. Six winters at Sanctuary without such a thing from any of our cats. What was he thinking?


I am quite sure he will not be doing that again. Nevertheless, there is now an additional copper pot crowding on the stove top to discourage such stupidity in the future. 

Our cats have loved the warmth of the stove as much as I do. They often spend winter days curled in a soft-sided pet bed savoring the warmth of each other and the stove.

But this year Domino refuses to lay in it. He just won't. I pick him up and try to settle him on the cushion. He sniffs and pussyfoots and jumps back out. He and Simon used to remind me of the yin yang symbol when they were curled together - Simon's light tan body forming a circle with Domino's silky black. 

We still miss Simon, Domino and me. Somehow, this winter just seems darker without him.

I have begun taking my walks in the afternoon now, timing them to bask in golden sunsets. For several years I have been adding daffodils in our various garden beds. They are one of the few things that I have found to be truly deer resistant. I go from garden to garden, bed to bed, and find pointed green tips pushing up through the dark soil. Our coldest days are still to come, but these tenacious bulbs have decided it is time to wake up and get on with the work of producing beauty. 

Winter doesn't last forever.

Missing Simon

I think we're going to be okay, Domino and me. We are snuggled in front of the wood stove here at Sanctuary, listening to waves of welcome rain pattering across the roof like tiny animal feet.

It's been a difficult week for us. Simon, my faithful kitty companion for eleven years, began having seizures. I mistook the first on Saturday for slipping on the stairs. He had started favoring his right front paw so his gait was a little gimpy. He cried out and I picked him up and cuddled him and he seemed alright.

On Sunday he had two more. They were unmistakably seizures. They were relatively brief, ten to 15 seconds, maybe. 

They were terrible to watch. 

On Monday I called our vet's office. My favorite doc was in surgery all morning. Would someone else be okay?

A no-brainer.  But how I dreaded this visit. 

The vet gently examined Simon and was trying to find a way to soften the diagnosis I was already expecting, already dreading. I cuddled him as the first injection was given. I continued as he drifted asleep and the second, fatal injection was inserted. They gently set about positioning his body as if he was taking a catnap there on the hard metal table before rigor set in.

The assistant quietly took my payment right there, to spare me stopping at the desk in the waiting room on the way out. They wrapped him in a soft blue towel and tucked him back in his carrier and I took him home for the last time.

On Tuesday I walked through our woods, shovel in hand, searching for a place suitable for a kitty cemetery. I think it's been a long time since I buried a cat. I found a place among the trees where the rich, red-brown earth was soft and yielding. I dug a Simon size hole, retrieved him from the mudroom, carried him like a baby still wrapped in the blue towel, and gently placed him in his resting place. I gathered a collection of Sanctuary rocks and piled a cairn to mark the spot.

I felt unexpectedly lighter once the weight of this task was completed.

But on Wednesday, Domino, my bushy-tailed, black-and-white shelter kitty, stopped eating. He barely sniffed the fresh breakfast in his bowl. I never heard the crunch of dry food. Not once all day long. I put tasty food in a small bowl to tempt him, thinking if the mountain will not come to Muhammed .... to no avail. I wasn't the only one missing Simon. We adopted Domino almost five years ago, one from a litter of four looking for a good home. He doesn't remember a life without Simon.

So Domino and I carried sorrow around with us all day long, each in our own way. I walked up to the rock cairn, more than once. He fasted and curled up in a ball and slept by the warm wood stove. We listened to more bands of rain sweeping across the roof and watched a movie upstairs in bed at night.

On Thursday I was roused from deep sleep by a warm, black and white ball of fur purring loudly in my ear and kneading the quilt that covered me. 

You're feeling better! I say. You've missed him, too, haven't you? 

I think we're going to be okay.

My Grandparents' Age

When my grandparents were my age, Grandpa was retired and he lived with Grandma in a small two bedroom house with a little guest house in back, next door to their daughter, my Aunt Ruth. They lived a quiet, orderly life without surprises or adventure. They seemed content.

I was allowed to stay over with them once, when I was about twelve or so. I thought it would be an adventure to sleep in the guest house by myself, but they insisted I sleep on the sofa in their little tv room. In the evening the three of us sat in a row and watched 'Password' and 'To Tell The Truth.' And while it wasn't exactly my idea of a good time, I loved being with my grandma. Plus, she shared her box of chocolates with me while we watched. 

At bedtime, I distinctly remember the shock of seeing my grandparents' teeth soaking in the bottom of an ordinary kitchen glass on a little shelf in the bathroom. Their lips looked like they had been cinched tight with some kind of invisible drawstring. And when Grandma insisted on a goodnight kiss - on the lips - I solemnly committed then and there to a lifetime of good brushing and flossing.

My 4th birthday.
 Grandpa's the one in sunglasses.

I remember Grandpa as a tall, slim man (in contrast to my pleasantly round grandma) who was unyielding once he had formed an opinion. It was kind of dicey at our house when they came to visit during election season. Grandpa, a Republican, and my dad, equally unyielding, a Democrat. Enough said.

Grandpa and Grandma ate lunch out at a little diner every day. When I rode with them in the car they insisted I sit snuggled between them in the middle of the front bench seat. It had been encased in some kind of slippery, protective coating. This was pre-seatbelt days, and some sliding was involved. 

Grandpa had this thing about dirt. He was also fussy about the 'air' and had this system of pulling out the ashtray to block the deliciously cool air from blowing directly on me. No amount of politely telling him how good the 'air' felt to one who was used to driving everywhere with windows rolled down in the hot, southern California summers, could dissuade him from this odd notion. Must be where my mother got the idea that we would surely catch a cold from being cold....

When we arrived at the diner, Grandpa carefully parked his car in the clearly marked No Parking Allowed zone, so certain was he that it didn't apply to him. And when a new waitress seated us at a table where, horrors!, I could actually feel the air conditioning gently ruffling my short hair on this 90 degree day, he made us pick up our menus and water glasses and move to a completely different table when she wasn't looking. 

I thought I'd just die of embarrassment.

As I look back on it, there really wasn't much to do at Grandma's house. I wasn't allowed to walk on the little strip of dichondra lawn in front of it, or walk on the sidewalk farther than the end of the block. Already a lover of music and having some skill at playing piano, I begged Grandma could I please play her little electric organ? When she said yes, I was pleased. When she turned the volume so low that even I, who was sitting right there on the organ bench, could barely hear it, well, let's just say it quickly lost its appeal.

I think I am now about my grandparents' age, before they sold that house and downsized to another, and eventually moved into a rest home. How life has changed in two generations! 

According to the Social Security Life Expectancy Calculator, at my grandparents' age, I now have a life expectancy of about 25 years. And if I make further milestones (a kinder way of saying growing even older) the odds of living even longer increase.

I should confess, I am not one to put much stock in such charts and calculators. I prefer not to measure the life God has given me by actuarial tables. But I do have some thoughts on living my life from this point on.

At my grandparents' age, I want to have brand-new experiences and adventures. I want to embrace the unfamiliar, develop new skills. I want to practice flexibility, and be alert to the world around me. I want to find a way to garden with a back that gets stiff and sore, and make beautiful music with fingers that show signs of arthritis. I want to enjoy good conversations and well crafted mysteries, even if it means making notes and keeping lists of fictitious characters so I can keep everything straight.

I want to both dream of life's many possibilities and release the desire for those things that just are not to be. 

I want to savor life even as I ponder what the future holds, and what heaven will be like, and grimace at world events unfolding before me on our 24-hour news cycle.

I want to travel with National Asset and see new places. I want to meet new people and learn new things, and enjoy visits with long-time friends.

I want to make music and design quilts and figure out how in the world to garden with the veritable zoo of wild critters who seem to think I have opened a restaurant.

I want to live out my days up here, in the woods, at Sanctuary.

And then, at the close of each day, I try to gather up all these 'I wants' and present them as a prayer that ends with but Your will be done.

Amen and amen.

Sierra Sunrise

It is winter, and it is pitch black. I turn over and look at the ceiling to check the time.

Again.

We have one of those cool clocks that projects time and temperature wherever you point the movable arm so it can be seen from a reclining position. Makes clock watching very easy. Maybe too easy. 

I take a slow, deep breath and tell myself to relax and sleep.

Again.

With all the practice I've had you would think I could just sleep until the alarm wakes me for these early morning airport runs. But no, it isn't working. I tell myself I can take a nap later.

Airport runs from Sanctuary are a whole different animal than those in San Diego. There is the distance, for one thing, and the dark. Dark up here in the woods is not like dark in a large city. Especially in the early hours of a winter morn.  If you have never experience life outside of ambient city light, you will just have to take my word for this.

Finally it is time to stop clock watching and just get up, get moving. I quickly brew a cup of ginger tea, my best remedy for all kinds of travel sickness, grab a couple of bananas and a package of crackers, and we are off. 

These runs in winter remain dark for the whole trip to the Sacramento airport and back again. On my last return, the sky was just beginning to lighten and the black crest of the Sierra Nevada stood bold against the dawn. 

But now it is spring. The clocks have already sprung forward. This time I drive home with the visor down, trying to keep an exuberant sunrise from blinding me. Even at this early hour on the highway that stretches from San Francisco to Teaneck, New Jersey, the one that goes "over the top" as folks say around here, I am but one of many travelers, all of us moving steadily towards the light.

I have been on this road in all hours of day and night. I have driven it with wipers frantically swatting rain from the glass,  and with eyes focused on the taillights of a semi truck in front of me when I can't see the road lines for the thick fog. I have learned to follow lanes that seem to shift like the concrete barriers in Maze Runner. (Will the work on Interstate 80 ever be completed?)

And sometimes, we take the 'back' route. It is a little longer, but I call it the scenic route. We head west on our way down the mountain and wind through flat lands where cattle craze and U2 spy planes practice flying overhead. I find it more serene. Except this one time...

"I can't not go," National Asset is saying in a very firm voice.

I am looking out the window as snow is quickly accumulating in our woods. I have never driven in this kind of snow before, the kind with huge, heavy flakes, and I seem to have misplaced my nerve.

"Okay," I finally say. "But I am going to drive to the airport so you can teach me how to do this so I can get back home again." 

I think of mail carriers and their motto - neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds - and I get in the driver's seat.  The wipers bat huge, wet flakes back and forth. I use my follow-the-taillights-in-front-of-me technique as The Asset instructs me on use of the brake and all the what if's I might encounter on the return trip.

It begins to rain as we reach lower elevations and I start to relax. The fields are green and lovely and the cattle bunch in groups with their heads low. I drop him off at the terminal and loop around to return home. I see color in the review mirror. A brilliant, giant double rainbow arches above me and I reflect on the Biblical promise it represents. 

Now I begin the assent up the back road. There is little traffic on this early, extremely wet morning. As I reach the altitude where we had forged our way through falling snow I smiled. The clouds were breaking, the sun was rising. And the road was completely clear of snow. 

Another successful trip to the airport. A dusting of pristine snow on our road (no one else has driven on it yet this morning).

And another Sierra sunrise to savor.