Sirius Is Fine

Spoilers: He's fine.

But when the emergency vet finally called me back, four hours after I'd left my severely injured cat, Sirius, in her care, to inform me that I'd better prepare myself for the likelihood of my cat's paw being amputated, I was not fine at all.

Here's how it all went down. 

Saturday, July 8 

We were sitting outdoors at the table having just finished dinner. With a thump, Sirius hopped over the back fence, and casually made his way up to the back door. I got up to let him in; I have a clear picture in my head of his smooth, sleek black body flowing up the steps and inside, across the orange rug and into the deep, quiet calm of the house. Knowing that he would be hungry, my fourth-born followed him to make sure he had access to a king's supply of kibble.

"Mom, Sirius is hurt." My daughter called down to me from an open window upstairs, and I felt the first, fast, fist of adrenaline slam into my stomach. 

Five minutes later, after establishing that he had a gnarly set of wounds, plenty of blood, and a little white thing protruding from his flesh - please tell me that is not a bone - we were off to the emergency vet.

Within an hour, with Sirius stabilized, the intake forms dutifully filled in, and the vet tech promising a vet would get a good look at him very soon, my daughter and I returned home to wait for a call.

Four hours later came that fateful call, with a suggestion that we sign an email consent for a surgeon to treat him in the morning, and do whatever he/she deemed necessary to be done. Including amputation.

Uhh no.

Absolutely not, my family and I decided. Stabilize him, bandage him, and get him going on antibiotics and pain meds, then we'll be by to pick him up. And we'll let our regular vet make the call on further treatment. 

^ "I am a groggy little cat in a cardboard box." Honestly, he's never looked cozier. 

^ Rather than lift him out of the box, we cut him out. And his siblings looked on in amazement.

Sunday, July 9

Eight a.m. is not a time when I usually bounce out of bed, but I was beyond eager to get Sirius back home. He was, as expected, groggy, disoriented, and rather unhappy with the huge bandage on his front left paw. He looked and moved like a peg leg pirate, and everyone was miserable.

We took off his head cone immediately, and settled in for some round the clock nursing care. 

The emergency vet had stressed hard that Sirius would need his bandage changed every single day, and I took those directions very much to heart. I left a message on my regular vet's voicemail, pleading desperately for an appointment on Monday.

My daughter and I took turns napping on and off during the night. Sirius slept fitfully. We worried nonstop.

^ "Someone has attached a miniature baseball bat to my leg and I am not impressed."

^ Angel child. 

Monday, July 10

Our vet's office called first thing and got us an appointment for that very afternoon!

What a relief.

Once Dr. Victoria got a good look at our boy's wounds, she gave us a report.

There was a lot of flesh damage. Most of the wounds were low on his paw, though there were a few nasty bits up near the top of his leg. Stitches and antibiotics would fix all that. 

Of the four digits on that paw - think of them as his fingers, she instructed us - two were broken. One was a clean fracture that would heal up just fine as is, but the other was a compound fracture. Yes, that was indeed bone we had seen in his open wound, and now some of that bone tissue had died and needed to be removed. 

"I've seen cats recover from far worse. They have an amazing ability to heal. I think Sirius is going to be just fine."

So with our hearts brimming with relief and trust, we sent Sirius off to the treatment area for a quick  procedure, and then a fresh splint and bandage. Little boy did great.

^ "I'm riding in the car and I'm completely freaked out!"

^ "Sometimes you just gotta give in and snuggle for a while."

^ Either dreamily gazing at the day lilies under which he loves to sleep or counting the hummingbirds he'd like to murder. Hard to tell the difference. 

^ "Another trip to the vet, another afternoon spent stuffed in a cardboard box."

Tuesday, July 11 through Monday, July 24

Days bled into nights and our normal routines were thoroughly upended by our round the clock care routine. Trying to keep our boy fed, medicated, and reasonably comfortable became our entire existence. Running him sixty miles round trip to the vet's office every three days to get his bandages changed, in the height of Boeing shift change traffic, became my regular grind. More than once, my daughter and I compared our challenge as similar to bringing home a newborn, though no newborn of mine ever put me through anything like this. 

We took turns dozing on our inflatable mattresses; since Sirius was not to be leaping up or down from the bed (though miraculously, his back legs had more than enough go power to get the job done)  we decided to join him on the floor.

We mopped up countless potty puddles, since he was not up for using even the special litter box we rigged for him with low sides so he could easily step in. 

We ran up and down the stairs fetching supplies for the sick room.

We watched handfuls of videos with tips for dealing with injured cats.

We took turns going out to feed ourselves, to shower, to take mini mental health breaks.

We also discovered that Sirius was so upset by his status that he began to have panic attacks. 

Some were small - he'd shake his bandaged leg in utter frustration, over and over again. 

Other times, he'd wake from a sound sleep and jump at the surprise at finding that wretched bandage still on his foot. Once he flew five feet out of a chair in a blind panic. 

The worst one happened about a week in. Apropos of nothing, Sirius hurled himself into the air, banging on furniture and the walls, launching himself again and again, screeching and yeowling at top volumes while using his back legs to try to lever off his bandage. He succeeded in yanking it about an inch out of place while his teeth and claws grazed my daughter and me as we desperately tried to pin him down with blankets. The experience was terrifying for all three of us and it took literally hours to calm him; we took turns swaddling him in light blankets and holding him tight. I found that he came closest to content when I held him so he could look out the window to the front yard; he and I watched from four a.m.to noon as night turned to day and our neighborhood came to life. It was a dreamy and surreal morning that I won't soon forget.

Later that day, Dr. Victoria helped us tinker with his meds to keep him more consistently sedated.

She answered our endless questions about how to help him better manage his stress.

She was endlessly encouraging and confident and reassuring to both our cat and us humans. 

She gave us just what we needed to keep going.

On Monday, July 24, two weeks and two days after his accident, Sirius got all of his stitches removed. An x-ray showed that the broken bones were healing nicely, and Dr. Victoria expected that he could soon move to a soft cast, which would be more comfortable and easier to move around in. 

^ Handsome boy on his last morning in a bandage. 

Thursday, July 27

Surprise! Sirius is suddenly bandage free!

We went in to the vet's office for what we expected to be a routine bandage change, and voila! What we got back was a cat with no bandage on his foot. Dr. Tim, the resident orthopedic specialist, gave our boy a good looking over and decided he was well enough along to function just fine without a bandage. 

My daughter and I were gobsmacked. The vet tech had to tell us more than once that we were really, truly done with bandages. Seemed like a miracle.

"Have him rest for another month, and call us if anything seems wrong." 

"Let him try out some light jumping and climbing. He'll stop if it hurts."

"I expect him to fully recover, and be the same cat he was before the injury."

^ "You think I look rough? You should see the other guy."

So now we are home, watching our brave little boy adjust to moving around without the dreaded peg leg. His injured paw is a bit of a mess, what with red, raw wounds still healing and the shaved fur just beginning to grow back. But all he needs now is time.

Sirius is going to be just fine

P.S. Sirius wasn't hurt in a fight. He wasn't hit by a car. We may never know exactly what happened to our boy, but my husband suspects he got caught in a mole trap and that may not be wrong.

355 Days

"It doesn't matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." -Confucius

Exactly three hundred fifty five days ago, I officially relinquished my life long dream of owning an in-ground pool. I was sad, but only a little bit sad, because something told me there was a better option out there, just waiting for me to find it.

When one door closes, another opens. Yeah, yeah. 

But today, just a little after noon, that new door officially slammed wide open and brilliant rays of of golden light came streaming into my back yard.

My new stock tank pool has arrived.

Now, it's entirely possible to simply level off my new stock tank bad boy with a bit of sand and gravel, fill 'er up with 1,117 gallons of water, grab my air mattress and get floating. But I have a bit more in mind.

First, we're going to excavate the grass and soil below, build a proper foundation, and sink most of the two foot tall tank into the ground. Then there'll be some decking built around the circumference of my shiny new watering hole to provide room for lounging and sunning. 

My ultimate dream is to sit on deck and dangle my legs over the edge and into the water. 

We're also thinking about replacing our lawn with some more climate change-friendly green ground cover, and maybe linking together the different lounging areas we have scattered here and there around the back yard with an efficient web of walkways. 

Now don't get me wrong. Right now I have absolutely no clue how all these options will come together, but there's one thing I know for sure.

I am on my way to creating the pool of my dreams, and even though I'm taking my sweet time to figure out the details, nothing's going to stop me now.

* * * * *

I'm a lake lady and I need water. 

Follow along as I try to make my pool-owning dreams come true.

Commitment

Pivot

355 Days

Mud Hole

Getting Stoned

Señor Juan Aguayo

Four In One: Towering Trees

A perfect home for my dear friend. 

Once upon a time, I was a little girl growing up in Michigan lake country. All around the little cluster of homes that was my neighborhood, lay a friendly collection of woodlands. My friend Marilyn, who was three years older and ever so much wiser, and I spent countless hours of our early childhood playing in those woods. Oh, we built horse jumps and cleared a little homes beneath the sheltering arms of soaring oaks and hickories where we reenacted the homesteading adventures of the Little House books. On other days, we were the Boxcar Chikdren children, each of us having to play dual roles to cover all four characters among the two of us. (She was Henry and Jessie; I played Violet and Benny.) We picked pretend wild cucumbers and stored them away as pickles, and ate the real tiny, wild strawberries that grew on the hillside behind my house, warm in the morning sun. We investigated a rather large hole up that same hill, dug by a pair of local teenage boys in their best attempt to excavate a foundation for the home they were itching to build but apparently abandoned. We promptly renamed it the Bear Pit.  Although we were never too far from home, our mothers gave us tremendous freedom to play out in the woods for hours on end, and the effect was magical. There’s no doubt that these hours spent playing, imagining, and exploring among the towering trees are at the heart of who I am today.

Then Marilyn and her family moved away. At first, they settled  early, not much more than 10 miles away and our families were able to visit now and then. 

But a few years later, they made a much bigger leap to upstate New York, where they stayed permanently. My friendship with Marilyn faded into memory and I was left to explore the woods on my own.

Fast forward to August 2017. My husband, my dog and my youngest daughter and I had just taken a trip to Wyoming to view a dazzling solar eclipse and I returned home with stars in my eyes. And what  should I find in my mailbox but a letter from my long lost friend Marilyn. A miracle every bit as grand as the eclipse. 

In the years since then, Marilyn and I have renewed our happy friendship, this time as penpals. i’ve dreamed many times in these last few years of reconnecting in person, but how often does one get a chance to travel from the Pacific Northwest to upstate New York? Ever the optimist, I held out hope that circumstances might somehow bring us together, but I didn’t expect any miracles.

But just when you stop expecting miracles, that’s when they begin to take shape. Last winter when I received the invitation to my niece’s wedding in the Catskills, my brain followed a hunch. A quick Google search informed me that Marilyn lived just 90 miles north of the wedding venue. Huzzah!!

So that is how it came to be that on the morning after my niece’s wedding, I found myself jumping out of our rental car, crunching across the stones of a gravel driveway, and enjoying a heartfelt hug from my long lost friend, Marilyn. 

And much to my delight, Marilyn’s 200 year old farmhouse as well as her barns, fields, and woodland ponds did much to reassure me that Marilyn is still very much a woman of the woods. As she led me here and there about her property, showing me where the ducks nest and the deer graze, which shrubs are thriving and where the pond needs shoring up, I felt as though our friendship has been perfectly preserved over the years. Our shared passion for playing, imagining, and exploring in the woods is very much alive and well, and as my old friend Marilyn led me around her groves and stands of towering trees, my heart felt as if I had finally come home. 

Four In One: Anchors And Adventures

 

Dear Emily and Demetrio,

At your wedding, as is often the case in a postmodern ceremony, you chose to share words about your understanding of what marriage means, how you expect it will change you, challenge you, grow you.

And what you said, as I can best paraphrase, is this.

Life is about anchors and adventures. In order to boldly sail off into life's unknowns and embrace all the beautiful chaos that life has to offer, it's important too to have a place of safety and security to which one can retreat when the world becomes a bit too much to bear. And by uniting your lives in marriage, you both believe that you will make a great team that builds up both sides of your lives together.

Anchors and adventures.

And as I close in on thirty-nine years of my own married life, I'd say that's just about right. 

Now, life can be full of surprises, and no one ever stands at the altar with a clear picture of how their new marriage will unfold. When I got married all those years ago, though I didn't express them in the same words, I had similar ideas about anchors and adventures with my new husband and not surprisingly, I got some surprises along the way. It seems that my husband turned out to be more about the anchors, and I'm heavily into adventures. But that's worked out fine. Even though we don't always line up in the ways I thought we might, we still make a great team that builds up both sides of our lives together. 

Anchors and adventures.

So sail off, my loves! Celebrate your new life together by continuing to build a home of safety and security in each other's hearts, and also by launching off into the crazy cross-continental move of your most daring dreams. There's nothing on God's green earth that you can't do together, and there's no end to the sweet and tender care you can offer to one another. 

Anchors and adventures. 

I can't wait to watch your new life together unfold. 

With much love, 

     Aunt Diane

* * * * *

All photos by Jean Kallina Photography taken at Full Moon Resort, Big Indian, New York

Four In One: Full Moon Resort

 When is a vacation not a vacation? Uh, when it's four vacations in one.

Yes, my husband and I flew east in early May to spend some time with our number two daughter in Columbus, Ohio. And that was fun. We ran errands together, helped her with some odd jobs around her home, and kept up our WFH responsibilities as well. I cooked a handful of her favorite meals and we also indulged in the best local takeaways. In the evenings, between baseball games and the Kraken playoffs, we found common streaming ground, which is no mean feat: The Last Thing He Told Me, Ted Lasso, and my personal favorite, Transatlantic. All in all, it was a solid, productive and entertaining week.

Yet that was just the tip of our vacation iceberg. Wanna hear the rest?

* * * * *

Saturday morning, bright and early.

Swing by the Starbucks for the caffeine crew.

And settle back into your seat because we are road-tripping to a wedding in upstate New York.

Yep, one of my nieces is tying the proverbial knot at a cozy resort in the Catskills. That gives us 8.5 hours of driving up to the northeast corner of Ohio, and across the lovely rolling green hills of Pennsylvania where we saw a literal team of horses pulling a plow across a field - Amish country! By 6 p.m. we pulled into a train station in Dover, New Jersey, where my first-born, who had flown from Seattle to JFK the day before and stayed overnight with a friend in Brooklyn, hopped off the coach and into our car. We stayed the night nearby and next day took the scenic route to our first destination.

Full Moon Resort. 

You know, I'd not spent any time Googling the resort so I had no any preconceived images in my head, other than the epic jewel that is Mountain Lake Lodge where Dirty Dancing was filmed. Now that resort is technically in Virginia, even though the story line insists Baby and Johnny danced their hearts out at the fictional Kellerman Lodge in the Catskills, so that's where I got my imagery. Anyway, it was great fun because my mom loved Dirty Dancing - and Patrick Swayze in general - so I felt her presence near found myself smiling at the unlikely connection. 

The Sunday ceremony was held down at the riverside, the gurgling stream and tender spring greenery made pure poetry, and the wedding came off without a single hitch. And though I took no photos during the evening shindig, I captured a hint of the resort's beauty the next day.

^ As I ran down the slate slabs that form a walkway to the Night Sky Cottage and found an old gate leg wooden table with chairs on the well-shaded front porch, I knew we had chosen our lodgings well. We pulled our cooler from the car and sat right down for a lovely lunch of salami, cheese, crackers and fruit. 

^ Esopus Creek runs along the western edge of the resort property; the other side is a forest preserve with nothing but tender young deciduous trees. A tributary of the Hudson River, this happy stream's name is a Dutch word meaning "brook" or "small river" as well as a local native tribe. She's very sweet.

^ To the east, another forest preserve covers what the Eastern folk refer to as a mountainside. They are so cute about their tiny little hills, and we PNWers must never poke fun at their monumental illusions. 

Here we are in The Barn, enjoying a simple but satisfying farewell breakfast. I confess to skimming 90% of the blackberries off the very large serving bowl of fruit salad, and I have zero remorse. Along with the little link sausages and the white paper lanterns, they were my favorite part of the meal. 

* * * * *

And now we're off again! You'll never guess where we are heading next...

Transition Carrots

"Transitions are a time for reflection, and a time for looking forward." -Roy Cooper

"The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution." -Paul Cezanne

First thing every morning we walk downstairs, my dog and I, and head straight to the fridge. Gracie almost always gets there first, and parks herself with a tidy sit. She watches breathlessly as I open the door, dip my fingers into the cool water inside a certain red bowl, and extract a small handful of carrot slices. With rapt attention, Gracie perfects her position, wriggling with uncontrollable delight but holding remarkably still as I close the door and consider her. 

She waits for it.

"Good dog," I say and offer the first slice.

Thus begins another day, and a ritual we have come to call "transition carrots.'

As our day unfolds, we dance back and forth with one another. 

She goes outdoors for a potty break.

I slip off for a few hours to meet with students.

I go out to work in the yard for a few minutes.

We go out for a walk together and return home, joyously, together.

Each one of these partings and reunions is graced with another round of transition carrots. Just a few delicious bites remind us both that, yes, this day is on track and going well. We are together and all is right in our world.

Sharing a few crunchy carrots is a wonderful way to celebrate our happy life together.

Reading | Tiny Beautiful Things + The Marriage Portrait

Tiny Beautiful Things | Cheryl Strayed

Neat

Discrete

Modular bits of honesty

Packaged in the form of an advice column,

Dear Sugar takes on questions about relationships, parenting, and other details of our life in the cosmos.

She responds with clarity and sensitivity,

Often sharing intimate glimpses into her own life,

Always with a generous serving of compassion.

The book ticks through a number of Dear Sugar questions and answers.

The author responds to each one in a naturally conversational and disarmingly affectionate style.

The result is comfortingly orderly and satisfyingly sweet. 

The Marriage Portrait | Maggie O'Farrell

Lush and rich, exotically paced and luxuriantly detailed, this story is a sumptuous dream of what might have been. The truth is that the famous Medici family of Renaissance Florence did indeed produce a daughter Lucretia who was indeed married off to a duke at a shockingly young age and mysteriously perished not much more that one year later. Along with a handful of other factual details, the author, Maggie O'Farrell, has used her considerable imagination to embroider a story of what may have happened; a fanciful series of events that fill in the holes between the facts; to lead us, her breathless readers, on a whirlwind of coincidences and surprises that delivers us a very different ending that we may have expected.

Along the way, O'Farrell unfolds her story at a luxurious pace, detailing the tiny animals that gentle Lucretia loves to draw, the claustrophobic confines of her extravagantly designed and detailed wedding dress, every twitch and twinge of her husband's muscular body as rage overwhelms him. To be sure, some readers find O'Farrell's thorough attention to detail, her careful accounting of every possible fact, her patient recitation of Lucretia's every thought, to be a bit, well, overdone. Others argue that the sumptuous language perfectly befits a story about a complex and compassionate Renaissance duchess caught in the grip of a highly dangerous marriage.  

* * * * *

I rarely think much about the order of the books I read. To be honest, I'll google around a bit, come up with a handful of new titles, reserve them on my library app, and read them in whatever order they drop into my phone. There's no rhyme or reason to my flow, which is fine with me. I rarely think about it. 

But reading these two books back to back was a gift. Their very different styles and story lines create a radical contrast that intensifies the beauty of each book. Tiny Beautiful Things washes me in a clean white light; Dear Sugar's kind words fill my heart with the music of emotional care and remind me of how much we all gain when we treat one another with kindness and compassion. 

Alternatively, The Marriage Portrait launches me into a nightmare of the many horrible ways that power corrupts humans, and particularly, how women - young girls! - have been used throughout history in men's games of control and domination without any regard for their own wishes, their own safety, their own lives. But still, in the midst of Lucretia's darkest moments, she discovers helpers, people even more powerless than she who still find ways to lend her a hand. And she is grateful.

And that is perhaps the most beautiful treasure of reading these two books in sequence - the soul tie between Dear Sugar and Lucretia. Both kind-hearted women remind me that of all the things we can choose to offer this world, compassion is the best, most necessary gift. 

* * * * *

My 2023 book reviews:

Demon Copperhead 

Tiny Beautiful Things + The Marriage Portrait