My goodness! My head is fairly swimming with all the news and stories I have for you! I hardly know where to begin!
Let me start by saying that I hope this letter finds you happy and healthy.
My current desktop photo is my breezeway decorated with items from my mother’s kitchen. In her move she found things she didn’t need anymore and I was happy to have them.
Speaking of my breezeway…
When we arrived at our Mountain Home, Mike unlocked the windowless door of the breezeway and pulled it open with a groan of protest from hinges that haven’t been asked to work in over a year. He brushed aside a few old spider webs and stepping inside pulled a big sheet of cardboard from the window, flooding the breezeway with sunlight. We got our first look around and I saw it almost right away.
“Saw what?” you ask.
I saw the skeletal remains of a young bird. It was there, under the metal stool that sits just inside the door and next to the cat door.
Instantly, in a flash, a blink of an eye, even without thinking about it - I knew what had happened - and it made me sad.
The birds build their nests under the eaves and in the rafters and any place else they want to for that matter. One such bird family built a nest, laid eggs and kept them warm until they hatched. Fed the babies with unerring devotion and on Flight Day Baby jumped from the wrong side of the nest and ended up in my breezeway which became an oubliette, a prison, and ultimately a death sentence.
I saw his bones and feathers dried into a pile of lifelessness and dust and it made me sad. The only light onto the breezeway would have come from the clear plastic flap of the cat door and that is where he spent his final moments. In my mind’s eye I could see the poor creature trying to get out into the day only to be met with a locked door.
Sigh.
Could he have gotten out if the cat door hadn’t been locked? I wondered. I didn’t know but at least it would have been more of a chance than he had. I’m going to make sure it’s not locked when we leave this time.
I really hate that he had to die that way.
The first time we came back to our Mountain Home after having been gone for a few months, I found a mouse in the bottom of a trash can.
Starvation, dehydration is a death I wouldn’t wish on even a mouse. I turn all of my cans upside down before leaving now. And a few years ago I saw a litter of newborn kittens, abandoned by their mother, die of starvation. It isn’t fast and it isn’t pretty.
“Peg, it would have been kinder to kill them,” you say.
Yeah, it would have been kinder, however, I couldn’t do it. And secretly I was hoping another cat would adopt them. When it didn’t happen, I put them out and let the night take them.
The next few days were a whirlwind of cleaning the apartment, moving things out of the RV and getting settled into our Mountain Home.
Sweeping and cleaning the breezeway was a little ways down on my list of things to do and I could manage to walk in and out of the breezeway without taking too much note of the little guy laying there. His little feathers were dark and blended in with the myriad of spider webs and dust bunnies that lived there with him - and being under the stool helped too. But eventually cleaning day did come and he got swept up and unceremoniously put out with the trash.
Sigh.
At least I wouldn’t have too see it and think about it anymore, right?
Yeah.
Well, you know something?
I love the visions that words evoke. You would think, judging by what I wrote, that I cleaned my whole breezeway, wouldn’t you. Had there not been any more to this story I’d have been happy to let you go on thinking that too.
Confession is good for the soul.
I didn’t clean the whole breezeway.
When you step from the apartment onto the breezeway you can go left or right. On the left is an alcove with a desk, a chair and a couch. It’s where my recyclables collect and live until I take them to the recycling center. It’s where all the boxes of Momma’s things are piled as well as a few boxes of other stuff. Against the wall and straight across from the apartment door are three chairs and an old microwave stand. The breezeway doglegs back to the right at this point and in that section is where the little metal stool sits (where the bird died) with a table on the opposite wall and the outside door is straight ahead.
I wasn’t actually to the Clean Breezeway part of my list yet when I spotted the baby bird laying there once too often and felt sad for it yet again.
Oh for heaven’s sake, Peg, just sweep it up and be done with it, my ever practical mother said in my head. On an impulse I grabbed the broom and started sweeping and once I started I kept on sweeping, at least up to the apartment door, choosing to deal with the packed boxes beyond that point another day.
Days passed into weeks and I didn’t think about that baby bird anymore. Then one day, standing there sorting through the recyclables, I see a loop of string, hanging from the end of a pan, sticking up out of a box, stacked on a couch so full of stuff you couldn’t sit on it if you wanted to.
I helped Momma put some of those loops on pans so she could hang them on her wall. Hey! I could hang them on my wall right here in the breezeway!
It took me long enough to think about that. We’d been there a month at this point.
And thus, Decorating Day arrived.
I had a good time pulling things from boxes and finding homes for them on the wall. Slowly, one by one, the boxes were unpacked or moved to the back of my shop for extended storage. Then I grabbed the broom to finish sweeping the breezeway. That’s when I saw it.
“Saw what?” you ask.
Well, I didn’t know what it was, not at first. I thought the desk was damaged and then upon closer inspection I saw it was white and it was on the cross brace of the desk and on the floor beneath. It looked like bird poop. I puzzled over this, probably longer than you would have, before it dawned on me that that’s where the baby bird had hung out. Maybe he went back and forth, spending his days on the cross brace of the metal stool, crying out for rescue, seeing the light but unable to get to it, and maybe spending his nights on the cross brace of the desk.
And…
I was sad all over again.
“Peg, death is just a part of life.”
I know. Try telling that to my heart.
<<<<<>>>>>
That cat!
That darn cat!
Yeah, Baby Blue.
We have three sets of shelves in the apartment and Baby Blue liked to climb up and get in one of the cubbyholes.
“Let’s clean it out and make it for her,” Mike suggested so we did. I moved things onto other shelves and we put a rag down for her and…
She wouldn’t use it.
No open flat space in my home goes unused. I tossed a hat on the shelf.
A few days later I put a box in front of it. “Baby Blue! Get off there!” I told her. “That’s not yours, it’s Kandyce’s!”
“You better put it in the RV or you’ll forget it,” Mike said.
I put the box in the RV and over the course of several more days I added stuff to a stack I had started in the unused cubby, stuff I didn’t want to forget.
Yeah.
Now it’s juuust right!
Baby Blue always thinks anything new in the house is hers. I bought a two pack of Multi-Cat cat litter and saved the outer box (which is sturdy) to put some stuff into.
Yeah.
Baby Blue has certainly brought us many smiles through the years and life without her wouldn’t be near as much fun.
Having her declawed wasn’t anything we wanted to do and once in Pennsylvania and far from our vet, Baby Blue started limping. We were eight weeks past her surgery. Did she have a piece of litter stuck in there causing her problems? Surely if that was the issue it would work it’s way out, right? It wouldn’t be long until we’d be heading west, so I decided to just watch her and take her to our vet when we got back to Missouri if she wasn’t any better by then.
A couple of days later Baby Blue is holding her paw off the floor and not walking on it at all. I was worried about her.
We have a vet in Wyalusing, not far away. There’s a vet in Wysox which is just twelve miles away. Do we go to either of those? No! We drive thirty miles to East Smithfield! I didn’t want to drive thirty miles to East Smithfield! Because guess what. You then have to turn around and drive thirty miles back!
I called Wysox Pet Clinic. Closed on Friday’s. It was Friday. Who closes on Friday!
Grumble, grumble.
Well, despite the fact that Wyalusing Pet Clinic told us to take our animals some place else, maybe if I apologized they would see us? Surely after all these years their grievance against me has faded. Maybe? Maybe if they won’t see us I could ask the Kipp’s to take Baby Blue for me? I love the Kipp’s and I would almost bet my bottom dollar they would do it for me if they could, but I didn’t really want to ask them.
I called the Wyalusing Pet Clinic.
“This is Christy, how may I help you?”
“Our cat was declawed two months ago and now she’s limping, could you see her today?” I asked.
“Did we declaw her?”
“No,” I answered.
“Have you been here before?” Christy asked.
Uh-oh. Here it comes. What am I going to say? I was quiet for a moment trying to decide. “I don’t know how to answer that,” I started. “We were there a long time ago and...and...” I hesitated. I was a bitch, I don’t want to say that - even if it was true! “I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice.” Yeah! That was true! I hurried on. “But if I promise to be nice will you see my cat?”
“What’s the name?” she asked.
I gave her my name and waited for her to type it into the computer. The moment of truth was at hand. Any second a big red flag will appear on her screen saying this person has been blacklisted. “You can just take your pets someplace else.”
I waited.
“We can see you at eleven-ten,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said appreciatively and hanging up I breathed a sigh of relief. That wasn’t too bad and we wouldn’t have to drive sixty miles. Yay!
We arrive for our appointment fifteen minutes early and they kept us waiting for another forty minutes as other people came and went. Fun. But I didn’t get mad. I promised to be nice, and I was nice. When our turn finally arrived the vet checked Baby Blue and saw that she does indeed have something going on with her paw but she didn’t know what.
“Her nail could be re-growing,” she told us and I hadn’t known it could do that. Our twelve year old Molly has a nail that I thought the vet just missed, now I know it probably has re-grown, but it hasn’t caused her any problems so we let it be.
The vet gave Baby Blue a shot of an antibiotic that is supposed to last for two weeks, four syringes of an oral pain medicine that I had to give her one a day and one hundred and fifteen dollars later we leave.
I was out with Ginger and Itsy when our fabulous neighbors the Kipps, Rosie and Lamar, Maggie Dog and Mama Cat, came walking up the driveway.
Rosie, Mike and I settled on the patio as Lamar took care of the cats.
“Guess what we did today?” Mike asked as soon as Lamar joined us.
“What?” the Kipp’s said in unison.
Mike looked at me. “Took Baby Blue to the vet?” I ventured.
“How is she?”
“Well, the vet didn’t know for sure, she saw some weeping and scabbing and gave her an antibiotic and some pain medications,” I answered.
“Guess what Peg did?” Mike asked with a Cheshire Cat grin on his face.
The Kipp’s looked at me expectantly. Mike looked at me waiting.
Really Mike?
I don’t have any problem telling on myself but I do like to save some stuff for my letters. “I apologized,” I said simply.
“The people who are there now aren’t the same ones as owned it before,” Lamar said.
Doggone it! I’d swallowed my pride and apologized for nothing.
“But that’s okay,” he went on. “She listened and you got it off your chest, so it’s all good.”
Yeah.
Confession is good for the soul.
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