New Cat Overlady – Silent Saturday
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Talking With – Belated Thankful Thursday
This is a day late, as several things seem to be for me lately, but I wasn’t able to get it out yesterday.
Today, and yesterday, I’m thankful for the ability to speak with someone and not just at them. Being able to work things out is hard and often feels like two steps sideways and then a partial step in an unseen direction that often changes and isn’t predictable. Being an adult is hard. Being a teenager is hard. Being a kid is hard.
Being human is hard.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to work things out. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Things take time, but sometimes you have to walk away from something, from someone, because you don’t have the time or energy to work things out. Sometimes you need a break, a little time apart, before you can even decide if you should work things out.
Being able to talk with someone about any of this is a blessing that not everyone has. So I am grateful that I am often able to do this in my life.
Hidden VIPs
How often you are unknown
Intent to remain unseen
Disaster strikes when spotted
Even though true friend you’ve been
So I was rinsing out the water dish for the dogs and cats and noticed a small bunch of animal fur that had gotten caught on the underside lip of the bowl’s rim.
Or so I thought.
Just barely managed to miss grabbing a wolf spider that had used some fur to augment it’s nest. Another wolf spider was then spotted trying to not be seen half a foot away on the same bowl.
I have several family members that would likely freak and kill the spiders in their panic, entirely on purpose. I like spiders (so long as they aren’t a danger to small children or animals) and simply gently replaced the bit of nest that I’d grabbed up. Calmly apologized to the spiders and put the bowl back exactly as I’d found it and then refilled it. Spiders are very important members of this farm, though most of the house would vehemently disagree.
Hope the spiders are able to fix the nest.
You Will Be Missed as Fiercely as You Were Loved – Silent Sunday
Cherish – Thankful Thursday
Usako was born under the junction of two teenagers’ beds pushed together in a room that held three teens in the household. Her mother had been brought home when she was 8 weeks old and when she was of age, Usako’s mother got pregnant just before her appointment with the vet to get fixed.
Usako was named by the first of my family to call her ‘mine’ because her ears were the same size as a kitten as they are now. She also liked to hop around and startle people with her agility. Thus, she was named ‘baby bunny’. (It should also be noted that we were all huge weebs as teens and not much has changed in that regard.)
Usako has lived with at least one member of my family for the entirety of her 18 years of life. She is also the longest lived pet in my family including against my parents’ childhood pets, with the previous record being held by my mom’s dog Fluffy who died at 17 years old.
Usako has been declining as of late and has had 2 strokes this year at different times of the year. I don’t know how much longer she’ll be with us, but I am grateful for the time we’ve had together. Her fur is still as soft as it was when she was a kitten and she still loves to cuddle even if we have to take care of her claws when they catch of everything as she has less and less control over them due to age and the strokes.
Animals, especially the kinds that most humans keep as pets in the house, have a much shorter life span than us. It hurts each and every time I’ve lost an animal and I don’t expect that to change. But I would rather have them and hurt than not have them and feel empty. To me, the pain of loss teaches me to love while I can and cherish the memories after they’re physically gone.
I will miss her when she goes, but I will cherish the almost 2 decades that we had her.
Early Morning Movement
However long it takes to learn
Only stopping to rest before onward yearn
Prayer must join action to bound
See how far you fly from the ground
My youngest dog had neurological damage that he’s worked to over come since he was 8 weeks old. He had a series of seizures the day he was going to go live with another family. They ended up taking his brother instead and we took him to the vet for treatment. He was on anti-seizure medication for almost a year without anymore seizure activity before the vet decided to slowly wean him off the medication to see how he was doing. He hasn’t had a seizure since that string of them over 48 or so hours at 8 weeks old and has been off the medication for 3 years. The vet never could figure out why he was having seizures even if he found clear neurological damage and watched one of the seizures in person during that first appointment.
(There’s nothing so helpless feeling as watching a baby, no matter the species, seize and not be able to do a thing other than make sure they don’t injure themselves further and clean them up after.)
Cheese had to relearn how to eat, how to drink, how to walk, how to go to the bathroom without help, how to…
He had to relearn how to do everything.
They thought he would be mostly blind. He sees out of both eyes. Not perfectly, but he sees.
It took him a long time to learn how to bark. I had to learn how to sleep light enough to wake up and take him outside by responding to his very quiet whimpers. He had delayed development on most things, including learning that there were others he could chase in games other than his parents or his cat family members.
He mourned the hardest when his favorite cat uncle passed away last year. Cheese and his dad, Vincent bonded tighter over the loss of Cutis who they both loved so much and who loved to cuddle with them.
Each time Cheese has made an advancement, I have rejoiced.
Each morning, the dogs go out with me to break and remove ice from the outside animal water bowls and add hot water to keep it from refreezing. They’re not supposed to come into the chicken winter yards, because it’s hard to get them to come out sometimes. One of the chicken winter yards doubles as the chick yard during the summer and fall when we have chicks hatch and are old enough to start living outside part of the time. The gate into that yard has a stop across the bottom about knee high on me, too high for Cheese to step over and he’s never been very good with his back leg strength. Because of this, he always needs help getting into that yard if we don’t have the hen barn doors open for the dogs to do a rodent sweep of the interior and the yards connected through doors big enough for chickens (and dogs) to enter the fenced off chicken yard. Vincent knows to stay out during the ice breaking portion of the water in the morning so I don’t accidentally hit him with the ice as I scoop it out and fling it to the side where the chickens don’t go. Helena is too busy checking in some of the branches/wood piles for rodents that like to hide there in the winter as well.
So I don’t always close the door to the yard behind me.
I move to scoop the ice out of the bowl, and Cheese comes walking around me, inside the yard heading over to the door the chickens come out of. He doesn’t go in, he just wants to see where everyone is.
This is the first time since he was less than 8 weeks old where he could jump using just his back legs.
I almost cried when I got to see him jump back out. Probably would have if it hadn’t been so cold out and my face wasn’t so numb.
He’s four and a half years old and he can hop over a barricade as high as my knees.
I know it won’t be an always thing, that there will be times where he attempts and doesn’t make it, but I don’t care. He did it not once, but twice. He knows he can do it now and will keep trying. Maybe he won’t be able to jump as high or as far as his parents, but I don’t care. He’s never given up even if it took time.
Of course, this means I’m going to have to be more aware of where I put some things (like food) because now he knows he has a chance, a good chance, of reaching things that were always out of reach before.
But I don’t care.
(I had to find chunks of ice to get him to hop back out of the yard because he didn’t want to leave and I knew he’d start barking like a fog horn (he’s so loud!) if I left him in there. Then I had to find two more chunks of ice for his parents. Those dogs love to chew on ice…)
Blooms in Life – Thankful Thursday
My third eldest sister gave this plant to our mom a few years ago. Mom’s been having me water it religiously and even wanted to remind me to do it when she went into the hospital for surgery and was going to be there for a week. (Followed by a few weeks staying at the sister who gave this’s house as she lived closer to the hospital for post-op appointments before she could come all the way home. We live an hour and a half from the hospital she had to go to for the surgery.)
This is the first year that this plant has bloomed.
A single bloom that is beautiful not only for itself but for the years it’s taken to reach this point.
Life is like this, too, sometimes. We can work on something for years, never seeing the full fruits of our labors (other than the continued status quo). And then a moment comes where there’s a single moment of joy or beauty as a pay off before it slides back into the status quo.
But now you know that things don’t have to stay the same forever. There is going to be progress at some point. Just keeping going, just keep swimming, don’t give up.
This toil and labor isn’t without reward.
Sleepy Old Lady
Usako’s getting up there in age. She’s 18 years old. We’ve never had an animal live that long with us despite excellent care. The longest was Sissy, a Malamute/German Shepherd mix, who made it to about 14 years old. (We were never sure just how old she was when she was rescued. They thought maybe a year or two and she lived with family for about 13 years before she passed.)
Usa’s a grumpy kitty sometimes, but she loves to cuddle with any human that sits still long enough. Of course, ‘long enough’ for Usa is about 5 minutes or less (depending on the human). She’s still as soft as she was when she was a kitten. (We got her mother when Cotton was 8 weeks old and she had Usa in her first of two litters when I was a teenager. Usa was actually born under my bed.) Her ears were the same size as a kitten as they are now, which is why my sister just older than me named her Baby Bunny. She also hopped everywhere for the first year or so of her life.
I wonder how much longer we’ll have her with us. There have been several times in her life where we thought she would die. At this point, I’m pretty sure she’ll go when she’s ready and not a moment sooner.
Neighbors – One-Liner Wednesday
Grasshoppers when they see me in the morning coming to dig up scotch thistle, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”
Better Than Expected – Thankful Thursday, Late
I’m thankful for the work of others today and for blessings given on top of the blessing of others. My mom was in surgery Thursday. The operation was supposed to be about 10 hours long, but there wasn’t as much bone or tissue loss as originally expected and they were able to finish almost 4 hours early with no complications. She’s healing well because of the care of others and even though medicine can attest for the training and diligence of others, there is still the blessing of having there be less damage than thought there would be.
The operation, while routine and having come a long way, still had a risk attached as all operations do. The risk isn’t even fully gone yet, but it still could have been as bad as initially thought and it wasn’t. It wasn’t, and that is a miracle, a blessing.
Breathing In 