The party light project

Our Christmas decorations have progressed through the years from full blown decorated tree inside and lights on the bushes in front of the house to lights on the sun porch and a few favorite ornaments around the house. One string of lights stays up all year, the twenty-five year-old lizard lights. An innocent comment a couple of months ago ("the lizards look lonely") led to a search for more party lights. Now joining the lizards are more vintage lights and the sun porch is lit up like a Christmas tree without the tree. Circumnavigating the four walls of the porch are carrots, lobsters, chili peppers, whales, grapes, musical notes, sunflowers, and motorcycles. Except for the motorcycles, which are new, the lights range from 1986 to 1999 and are still in good working order. I ran out of room for the trout, so they are outside on the bushes in front of the house for now. All told, it's a cheerful display at happy hour and the lizards are not lonely any more.

Shuffle your feet

When you are walking along the surf line, shuffle your feet so you don't step on a stingray and get stung. Likewise when you are walking around the house, shuffle your feet so you don't step on a cat toy and lose your feet out from under you.

O Rose, thou art sick

Wednesday was a day of convergences. 

Rose is a food-driven cat. When I arrived home Tuesday afternoon she was moving slowly and showed no interest in eating. I checked the litter box for small pee balls, indicating a possible UTI, but there were none. I called the vet clinic and had her there within five minutes. Her blood work-up showed signs of renal dysfunction. She had fluids injected subcutaneously and we came home. Her appetite returned. She ate and went directly upstairs and curled up on our bed.

Nick never left Rose's side until the morning. He curled up at the foot of the bed and looked at her with worried, adoring eyes. Yes, a cat can do that. For three years she has slapped him and tumbled him and demanded that he yield his spot to her, and as a result he is devoted to her.

Wednesday morning I dropped Rose at the clinic so they could collect a urine sample from her. My heart was full as I drove to work because my thoughts were six hundred miles away with my family in Tennessee. It was the day of the funeral for Great Aunt Zilpha, the gentle and quiet one hundred year old Rock of Gibraltar for several generations of Sharps and Darks. For years I have been ready to jump when the call came, and she endured, and when the call came I could not find a way.

I knew I would be listening to Shakespeare all day. My students had memorized Hamlet's meditation on existence. Though they are not one hundred, they spoke with understanding. Aunt Zilpha's answer to the question was emphatically "To be" and she gave that answer every day of her life. I thought of the time ten years ago when she stood next to a portrait of her parents and told me about them and their general store, and about her childhood in the village where she lived one hundred years, as if it were not so long ago, when it had been eighty years. I wanted to be one of the crowd that honored her on Wednesday.