Here it is the first Sunday of the first week of the first month of the year 2016.
I have had two desktop photos this past week. The first one is the deck area of Alley Cat’s, a bar undergoing renovations. See their cat logo? It’s what caught my attention and the reason I took the photo.
“What’s with the cowboys?” you ask.
This place used to be home to a bar called Burnt Ends and they had a rustic cowboy theme with bar stools made from logs and iron. It was kinda cool.
My second and current desktop needs no explanation. It’s a tractor sitting in the recent flood waters.
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Let’s start with Letter Facts.
This is the start of my nineteenth year writing a weekly letter. Some of you have been with me for all nineteen years!
I wrote fifty-eight letters and stories last year. My most prolific year ever! The shortest letter was two pages and I only wrote one that short. My longest story was forty-eight pages and I only wrote one story that long.
“But Peg, the longest one you sent me was only forty-three pages,” you say.
Yeah. It was. Kat’s Story was forty-three pages.
After Thanksgiving last year I received a gift and a card from a lady named Jen. Her husband Kim had received Kat’s liver.
In your time, this letter continues without missing a beat. But in real time there was a long, long, long pause after that last sentence and before this one. I have so much I want to say about that but not sure how to get there.
Jen’s letter made me a little teary-eyed but happy too. I thought I was okay and I tried to read it to Mike but then he started to cry so I started to cry too and couldn’t finish reading it to him.
Jen’s simple acknowledgement of Kat’s life made us grateful. Kat had lived. She had people who loved her and are sad that she is gone and miss her everyday. Jen promised to take good care of the little piece of her that they have.
There used to be a program called Wrapped In Hugs where the donor family was given a shawl so they could feel ‘hugged’ during their grieving and healing process but the program had been discontinued because they couldn’t meet the need. Jen had this one made for the donor family when and if Kim ever received his transplant and I am the lucky one.
Yeah.
It’s a beautiful shawl and smells nice. I don’t know how it came to be perfumed, but I like it.
After having it for just one day I felt guilty. I believe Phyllis grieved much more deeply than I did as she had been more closely involved in Kat’s life for the past fifteen years. I didn’t want to give it up, but did I really deserve it? No. The answer was no. I emailed Phyllis and told her that she deserved it more than I did and if she wants it - I’d send it to her.
“Thank you so much but no. I don’t need it and I won’t use it. You keep it. You deserve it as much as I do.”
She’s such a great sister.
So the shawl lives on the back of my computer seat and I actually use it quite a lot.
Jen’s card included a photo of her and Kim and their two dogs Skip and Bruiser.
She also included her address so I could write her directly if I wanted to. And I did. I wanted to send her Kat’s Story.
I found some old pictures when we were in Pennsylvania and I added two into the original story. Then I added some afterthoughts, all of which were in subsequent letters to you guys. Those things added another five pages to the story which makes it forty-eight pages, my longest story of last year.
“Peg, what about your RV story?” you ask.
Man oh man! I can’t get anything past you guys! It’s true. If you add up all four chapters in the ongoing RV saga it would amount to fifty-three pages. But I sent it in four installments so I counted it as four stories. Besides, how else was I going to tell you about Jen and Kim?
“Have you heard from anyone else?” you wonder.
Yes, I have. We have. Phyllis and I both get the letters. We heard from the lady who received Kat’s lungs but she didn’t include an address so I took it to mean that she didn’t want to hear from us. I guess that’s not necessarily true. But it is true that I never wrote her back. It has only occurred to me here in the last week or so that I can send Kat’s Story to Life Source, the company that handles the organ donations, and they can send it to her. She can then choose to read it or not read it as she wishes.
Okay, that was kind of a long detour.
I was not only prolific in the number of letters and stories I wrote last year, I also set some records for the amount of pages in each one. In years past I tried to keep my weekly letters to four pages and most of the time I stuck to that. Last year the majority of my letters were eight pages long, I wrote twelve of those. Nine times my letters were four pages long, eight times I wrote six page letters, five times they were eleven pages long and after that I was all over the board! If you were to add them all up it would come to five hundred twenty-nine pages.
Long about April I started naming and making covers for the stories and by the end of the year I settled on this design and color scheme. I don’t include the cover in the page counts.
If it sounds like a lot of paper, a lot of ink, stamps, envelopes and a lot of hours behind the keyboard, why then you would be right. It is.
Do I love to write?
Yes, I do. And the best part is when something I write causes you to think or feel and you let me know about it.
“Boy, I sure am lucky that Peggy loves me and gives me all of this for free!”
Yes. Yes you are. And I do. I love you all.
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I was listening to the Christian radio station that I love to listen to and one of the preachers said it is the perfect time to read through the Bible in a year. They had a link on their website to a daily reading guide and he also gave us a word of advice.
“If you miss a day or two days, don’t try to catch up. Just read what you are supposed to read for that day then if you want to read more you can always go back and read what you missed.”
Now that sounded like good advice. It would be awful tempting to quit if you knew you had days of reading to catch up on. Giving you permission to just skip what you missed takes all the pressure off and makes it totally doable.
“Why not?” I thought and downloaded the guide.
So this year will be my first time to read the Bible the whole way through. Other than that my only goals for the year are to continue to write and take photos. Working my other hobbies will all be gravy after that.
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We rented our studio apartment.
A young gal that works for one of our tenants, The Bread Bowl Bakery, moved into the apartment this week. She is a very pleasant young lady by the name of Kathryn and she has a three legged cat.
“What happened to his other leg?” I know! That’s what I asked too!
“It got broke, and needed an operation to fix it. I couldn’t afford it so they amputated it.” Kathryn works two jobs to support herself. “He gets along really well and you can’t tell he only has three legs until he runs,” Kathryn told us and she only just got him back from the vet a couple of days ago.
Speaking of cats…
We lost one cat and what happens‽ Another one shows up! (Notice my use of the interrobang? I figured out how to add it to my program. It remains to be seen if it will transfer to the web though.)
This little black beauty showed up a couple of days ago. When Mike opened the door she scooted right in. We don’t really need another cat but sometimes they pick you, you know what I mean? And this one picked Mike.
We don’t know what sex it is so until I know different we are going to call her a she. We don’t think she’s very old, six or seven months, maybe a month on either side of that. She smells of perfume as if she had been recently bathed and she has a flea collar on. We don’t know where she came from but we will not turn away an animal in need.
Our resident critters are not crazy about this interloper. Molly, our twelve year old calico, hasn’t had anything to say about her but Macchiato is very vocal about his unhappiness at having her here and hisses at her. She ran and hid from Itsy and Ginger the first day she was inside but you can see in the photo that by the second day she was challenging them.
Itsy will show interest in her until the claws come out then she leaves her alone. Ginger, on the other hand, can’t seem to take her eyes off of her. Where ever the black cat is laying, Ginger will be close by just watching her.
I’m not crazy about cats. Mostly I don’t like having cat hair all over me but as long as they use their litter box I can cohabitate with them quite well.
Then Kathryn had a problem. She called Mike. “The key broke off in the lock.” Mike went up to check it out and came back down looking for a pair of little pliers.
“There’s enough of it sticking out that I think I can get a hold of it,” he told me as I went looking for my smallest pair of jewelry making pliers. Then we went up to Kathryn’s together and I met her cat. He’s young, only about seven months old, he’s fluffy, long haired, and orange and his name is Pumpkin.
“Kathryn, you want another cat?” we asked her.
“Yeah. I’m gone so much of the time I’d like to have another cat to keep Pumpkin company.”
Kathryn came and met and fell in love with the black kitty and took her home. Later in the evening Mike called and asked how the cats were getting along. “Great!” Kathryn said. “They play together all the time.”
Whew. Dodged that bullet.
And with that we will call this one done!
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