About the Cats

 

The housemate and I have both reached an age where we're inheriting inanimate objects. It started as furniture from her family as they down sized to bungalows (think ranch style houses). There is a lovely chair in my living room that I am terrified of sitting on, but also a fantastic table that tends to hold the mail. Then it was the entirety of someone's cat collection. Not the live ones. Not the dead ones either. These are statuettes and pillows and coffee mugs, a pie bird,  and salt and pepper shakers. The housemate thinned out the collection. And from the experience, I learned to never ever buy anyone something that they are perceived as collecting. Unless its wool (yarn). I can always use more of that.

Last summer I finally managed to follow a crochet book--ok it was two crochet books with the help of the internet--and one of my nephews became the first recipient of a baby blanket that wasn't knitted. Midway through buying the wool for a blanket for my grandmother, she up and died. She lived in Florida and really didn't need a blanket so that's all right. When she was downsizing, she wanted me to take the plastic mushrooms that had adorned her wall during my childhood and dump them in her condo's shared skip. I stuffed them into my suitcase and carried them first to Baltimore, then to Alaska, and finally to the UK. I have other more important of my grandmother's things. I still can't figure out how to give up the mushrooms.

I'm a week behind on a writing project for a friend. It's an important project for her and for me. I'm not just embarrassed but  rather annoyed at myself about the whole thing. But I find it impossible to turn away two-year-old kisses even when they carry with plague. There will be a post, sometime in the future, about something of import to the larger world. In the mean time, please don't leave me.