One year ago I began to set words to this electronic page again after more than a year of silence. I semi-promised to be slightly more diligent in posting occasionally, but as it turned out, I didn't even post infrequently over the course of 2016. Ha! At least, not on this blog. I did keep up (to an extent) on the other two journals, so if you're interested in my quilting, go take a peek.
As for the rest of life, things are fairly status quo - for the most part. The exceptions are time and family members. Time just seems to continue moving faster and faster. Can't quite wrap my head around how long it's been between posts here, let alone the years jumping from one to the next much more quickly. Why is it time can't move quickly when we're kids, and then begin to drag once we are adults and have a handle on life (more or less)? Then we really would have more time to get things done, and still have hours left in a day to enjoy sitting back and relaxing.
Enter Jake, stage left -
We adopted a rescue cat in June. He was a ten-year-old who had been living 'on the streets' for years, and had (barely) survived by his wits and cat skills. Friendly as could be and not a mean bone in his frail body. He once belonged to somebody because he had been neutered, and he loved the company of people, but how he came to be in his pitiful state no one will ever know for certain.
Somewhere along the way Jake contracted FiV - essentially 'kitty AIDS.' As it takes a fair amount of time for the disease to progress in a cats' body - years, in fact - he had to have been on his own for at least the past 5 or more years. What a sad thought for this boy. For our boy. People were known to throw him food and leave water for him, but in freezing weather neither of those did him much good.
Frostbite took the tips of his alert ears, damaged his lips, eyelids and nose; it gave him a mottled look to accompany his unbelievably haunting, marbled eyes. Jake was missing a lot of fur, and reportedly had a severe case of fleas (possibly mange), wicked ear mites in both ears, and raging ear infections too. As if everything else wasn't bad enough, he was also missing most of his teeth, which caused a good deal of drooling, and an oft times lolling tongue.
In his sad state, Jake was photographed and posted online on a facebook page, and that is how I came to know of him. It was, in fact, his gaunt stare which captivated me, but then I caught sight of his frail and damaged body. Impossibly enough, I was smitten.
Before I could get my son to see the photo, it was removed from the page. Behind the scenes, rapid decisions were taking shape as to his future - mostly, whether or not he would have one. Jake's condition was bad - and that's putting it mildly. There were those, though, who hoped for something more than immediate euthanization, they only required someone to commit to giving Jake a place to go home to (following the vet work to get him a little healthier and much cleaner).
Karl and I were that committed home.
We met Jake on the way to a wedding, stopping by the veterinarian office to meet and greet for a few breezy minutes. It was confirmed that I would be picking up the splendid Jake after returning from an energy expo later in June, and Karl and I set about preparing to add a fuzzy face to our dwindling cat population.
We'd lost Cleo and Flop between May and September of 2015, and Hobbes - who was their elder sister by a year - was showing signs of slowing down and growing closer to her eventual departure, too. Jake needed a home, and Hobbes needed a fur-baby to lean on, and as much as we wouldn't allow ourselves to admit it, Karl and I needed to fill the huge void left by the deaths of two of our original family members. 15+ years is a long time for cats to occupy your hearts, your space, and be a part of your every day routine. It's hard not finding those sweet faces waiting for you around a certain corner, or in their favorite places throughout the day. When they're not there, it causes a torrent of tears.
As much as we missed Flop and Cleo, we found there was ample love to invest in Jake. He was hard to resist... and he was so easy to love. The new routines for his care left us less time to focus on the empty corners, and it also meant our brains didn't automatically recall the pain in the losses.
Then time did its grown-up thing, traveling fast and furiously. The summer came and went; fall arrived in the wink of an eye. All the while there were many trips for Jake to the vet for antibiotics; this was in hopes of fighting back the advancing respiratory infection that simply wouldn't let him alone. The improvements to his breathing gradually (but noticeably) subsided after each treatment. Eventually, I would have to make the horrible decision to let him go instead of prolonging the inevitable. Ah, but that's a story for another time.
Besides, we do still have Hobbes, and that deaf little 'bean' needs her own share of doting now.
And so our lives moved forward.
They're still moving forward
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