Fast little lives

This afternoon I took a route I rarely take to run errands. Instead of taking one of my usual circuitous and faster moving routes, I took the main artery through downtown and the university. It was mid afternoon, traffic was light, and it seemed like a good idea. Who is it that says, don't always drive the same way to work or going home... change it up a little to stimulate your brain? Bad idea this time.

Past the university, the road goes down a hill through a few blocks of houses before it reaches the next commercial strip. The cars were moving briskly, two lanes in my direction and one lane oncoming. He came from my right... a Carolina wren flying at bumper level across the road. He was fast, but there was not enough room for him to fly in front of the car coming toward me in the other lane. I heard the faintest ticking sound as the bumper hit him. In my side mirror I saw his body where it had fallen in the bike lane. His flight across the road took exactly one and half seconds. I wondered if he were a juvenile who miscalculated his timing.

I mourned him as if he were a friend. The wrens around our house fill the air with noise and motion. They dominate. Their call sounds like a heartbeat. I depend on them.

Last night I dreamed that our house had a wrap around porch. There in the dream were the four of us, me, Bob, and the two cats. I was out on the porch at dusk. I could hear a man out in the street talking on his cell phone, congratulating some reluctant person on the other end for being the lucky recipient of kitten love. This is a common tactic with people who have kittens to place.

The next thing I knew, there were three tiny gray tabby kittens on the porch. "Oh no," I said to them, "you can't come in. We already have two cats. We will find you a home." They were just the size for a cat calendar and identical triplets. As they milled around in confusion, being their cutest, I opened the door to tell Bob, "There are three kittens out here separated from their mother. We need to get them to the pet rescue." Two of the kittens dashed through the crack in the open door, just the way Daisy dashes into the closet. I'm pretty good with doors and cats, but they were fast. So I said to the third one, "I guess you'd better go in too, so we can keep you together." Bob and I agreed in the dream that we were not going to adopt three gray tabby kittens. That would be five. Too many. Two is perfect. The dream ended there, before the kittens had a chance to work their charm on Bob.

Two hard weeks

About ten days after Frida died, Bob left town for two weeks to play in an early music concert in Kentucky. Daisy and Nicky went into a decline. They had no appetite. They didn't want to play or have catnip or treats. When I left for work in the morning they looked at me as if I were never coming back. They refused to sit with me in the TV room in the evening. That was where Frida and Bob were supposed to be. One night they had a terrible fight, with Nicky chasing Daisy upstairs and downstairs. Nowhere was okay for her to be.

The next night I continued to play and have treats together with the cats, and I continued to offer them their favorite indulgent flavors for dinner. But I also had a new strategy. I watched a happy movie we had watched many times that has happy songs for the soundtrack. I realized that the movies I was watching earlier in the week were actually terribly downbeat with abusive characters suffering miserably. No wonder Daisy and Nicky were fighting and depressed, and the dark dramas were affecting my mood, too. That night, both Daisy and Nicky joined me in the TV room. A few days later Bob came home, and they were immediately themselves again.