Hello again to all you intrepid and loyal subscribers! I’m not too late with this newsletter as I’m writing it on 3 March 2020 and Bill will get it out a few days later.
Right now, Bill is putting the finishing touches on “The Complete, Annotated Murder on the Links” by Agatha Christie. This is the second novel featuring Hercule Poirot, and I must say he really outdid himself in putting this book together. In addition to the hundreds of footnotes, he wrote a dozen pieces, some of them quite long, that flesh out Agatha Christie’s life at that time, her fraught relationship with her publisher, and the storm clouds on her marital horizon. Look for that later this month!
That’s all the book news we have for now, so here’s what’s been going on at home.
Saying Goodbye
Mourning our pets is about the passage of time. We have them for (hopefully) a long time. We drink to the full our pleasure in their company.
Then it ends. They leave us, and they leave a hole in our lives. There’s no dog at the foot of the bed. No cat at the front door, eager to leave. No one waiting for me when I drive home from work.
And looking back, we see that time has passed, and that someday we will follow the path that our pets have already taken. And sometimes is seems that we’re not mourning them, but ourselves. Unlike them, we know what’s coming.
In our personal life, well, February was difficult. We are now animal-less. Completely and for the first time ever in our married life. For me (Teresa), I was last animal-less in the spring of 1985. I was stationed in Hawaii and I was desperately lonely and I got a cat. Daphne ended up going to someone else, but I left Hawaii with her kitten, Beautiful Vanessa, and Veronica.
I still miss Beautiful Vanessa to this day. She lived a long and full life, moving from one apartment to the next in Hawaii, weeks spent being boarded in Norfolk until I got apartment number 1, then my house, then moving to Charlotte to apartment #1, followed by apartment #2, and then Bill’s house in York, SC, followed by the move up here to Hershey.
Beautiful, beautiful Vanessa was a well-traveled cat. She was a tortoiseshell and, despite being born in an apartment on the 12th floor, she taught herself to hunt. She was a mighty huntress, killing birds on a 12th floor balcony, a 32nd floor balcony, a third-floor balcony, two second-floor balconies, my yard in Norfolk when she escaped, and then at last, a yard in South Carolina where she branched out into every kind of critter smaller than she was. We had many, many lizards with very short tails thanks to Vanessa not getting quite a good enough grip. When we moved to Hershey, Vanessa became a permanent indoor cat because our street here is busy. Our street in York, S.C. was so unbusy that the cats could sleep in the middle of the street unmolested by traffic.
Vanessa could bring down a squirrel. Vanessa could race outside when I got the morning paper to break a robin’s neck at the end of the lawn. Vanessa could leap five feet in the air to snag a sparrow at the birdfeeder. Vanessa liked snakes and it’s quite odd to see a cat slinking through the shrubbery with a rope hanging out from between her fangs.
Veronica was a darling pillow of a cat. She didn’t make it to Hershey even though she was a year younger than Vanessa. She moved almost as much as Vanessa, from a box in a supermarket parking lot as a kitten to Norfolk, to Charlotte, to York, S.C. She looked like a meat loaf with legs but she was sweet-natured and affectionate. She could purr like a buzz-saw.
Boris and Natasha
Boris and Natasha did make it to Hershey. A friend at the community college in Charlotte had a feral cat colony, and she had kittens that needed homes so we took Boris and Natasha. They were siblings but they didn’t look like each other. Boris was a brown tabby and Natasha was an orange tabby. They were, as you may guess, named after Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Boris could stomp around like he weighed 100 pounds and not ten. He was a southern kitty and thus his name was pronounced Beau-ris and not the Russian way.
There was nothing Boris liked better than leaving art installations of eviscerated mice on our doorstep for Bill to find by stepping on them. When we got Fido, Boris made it clear who the dominant animal in the household was and it was not the 70-pound dog with inch-long fangs. Boris died in Hershey, a victim of a fast-growing liver cancer. It broke our hearts.
Natasha, his sister, was a purr machine. She was sweet and all over the place in our home. She liked to eat earplugs so Bill learned quickly that he couldn’t leave them lying about. She liked fiberglass insulation too, encouraging younger son to cover the entire ceiling of our unfinished basement with white Styrofoam panels to protect the cat. Natasha slowly, slowly, slowly got old and then one day she slipped away from us on our kitchen floor during breakfast. She’s buried in our backyard here in Hershey.
Fido
Fido made it to Hershey too. He was our handsome auburn border collie, 70-some pounds of romping, stomping dog. He was the other reason we installed a four-foot high chain-link fence around our property in Hershey.
Fido was a border collie rescue from Florida (where my sister lives). She knew I wanted a dog and thought we’d be a good match, so I drove to Florida with oldest child, then four years old and came back with him. He was a wonderful dog; loyal, brave, good and true. A lot of Spotty in The Bride From Dairapaska is based on Fido.
It was heartbreaking when he developed terrible arthritis and I carried him up and down the stairs. He cried when we were on a different floor from him and what else could I do? But over time, every step became more and more painful and I did what I had to do and it still hurts.
With Fido gone and Boris gone, we only had Vanessa and Natasha. Then Valerie, the crazy cat lady next door, had yet another litter of kittens on her hands and did we want some? We said yes and that’s how we got Ivan and Olga. Russian names are so nice for cats.
Ivan and Olga
Ivan took over from day one, despite being eight weeks old. He was the only male, and he knew he was the boss. Amazingly, Vanessa and Natasha let him get away with it. Natasha even let him and his sister suckle at her although Vanessa (smart kitty!) batted him away. Ivan was truly bipolar. He let us play with him, carry him everywhere, and dear daughter dress him up in doll clothes and dance around the house.
Then, when he didn’t feel like it, he’d turn into a whirling buzz-saw of fangs and claws. Ivan, cute and cuddly and begging to picked up, bit Don (my sister’s husband) badly enough to make Don bleed on our dining room table and bit Anne in the ankle almost as much. They bled, which turned out good: Bill roughhoused one day too much with Ivan and got bitten for his pains and ended up stopping at the emergency room on his way home from work. The press gang at the newspaper printing plant thought it was bad to see dark streaks racing up his arm from the bite and the emergency room doctors agreed.
Ivan developed a fast-moving kidney cancer and now his ashes are in a little box in my dresser and, oh, God, how it hurts, to think of him not being able to run down the hallway anymore, making as much noise as a herd of thundercats.
Because of Valerie the crazy cat lady, we still see Ivan clones scampering about the neighborhood. They bring back a smile and fond memories.
Olga was soft and gray and shy; as unlike her brother as it was possible to be. She had the softest, most delicate purr imaginable; she had to be close to you to hear it and she only purred when she really wanted to. She liked being around us but only on her own terms. When Ivan passed, she became the dominant kitty and that meant she could finally stretch out on Bill’s desk, where Ivan had held sway.
She had a major health crisis a few years back. We think she ate something toxic, poisoned her liver, and so we syringe-fed her for weeks with the most expensive cat-food the vet had and she lived through it. We thought we’d have her for many more years and then, suddenly in early December, we didn’t anymore.
Muffy
When Ivan and Olga were about two and Natasha was years older, we got Muffy from Castaway Critters. I wanted another dog and it had been long enough since Fido’s passing that I could do it again. Muffy was all terrier, although she looked like a miniature German Shepherd (42 pounds). She had no intention of listening to me, when there were so many more interesting things to do, see, smell, and chase. She was almost cat-like in her independence and yet, she liked being around us at a comfortable remove.
Muffy patrolled our yard faithfully and she was the scourge of groundhogs. She slaughtered at least six that we know of, bravely going in for the kill to grab the critter’s neck and snap it while dodging teeth and claws. Groundhogs are large and vicious and she handled them with ease. She also brought us opossums on a regular basis, but never dead ones. Have you ever seen the animated movie Over the Hedge? We discovered opossums really do throw themselves down and play dead and when you leave them alone on the Florida room carpet (with Muffy safely behind a closed door) while discussing what to do next, they quietly get up and walk away and vanish into the shrubbery.
Despite being a killer of groundhogs, Muffy knew who the boss was inside the house: it was 7-pound Ivan and not her. Then as she aged, she began to develop health issues. In the last two years, Muffy had two rounds of brain fever or something like it, along with several other infections. She never quite recovered and in mid-February, I couldn’t stand to see her suffer anymore, and I did what I had to do.
So here we are. Animal-less for the first time in decades. Our pets have crossed the rainbow bridge and are together, meeting each other for the first time (in some cases) and reunited in others.
When spring dances in, I’ll do what I’ve been supposed to do for years and that’s sprinkle the ashes of my animals around the birdbath in the thicket. Fido and Muffy will be outside in one of their favorite places and Vanessa and Ivan will join them. Natasha and Olga are already there. I expect it to be painful, which why I’ve never been able to before. It’s hard enough writing this.
Grief is the price we pay for love.
Tell the people who you love that you love them. Life goes on and I’ll write another newsletter in April and, eventually, we’ll get another cat or two or three. When we do, we’ll let you know.