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| Our cat, Cuddles |
I love how she
curls her front paws under her chest and ponders the frozen view. She’ll sit for
hours without moving a whisker, her beautiful eyes fixed upon our neighbor’s snow-covered
woodpile—her hunting ground when the snow melts and the earth thaws.
Sometimes her eyes
close as if dreaming of mice. When she spies a passing wing or our chickens downhill
strutting in their pen, she swags her tail, slowly. Oh yes, come Spring, birds
beware!
Cuddles and her
sister, Mittens, now thirty-something in feline years, seldom play inside any
longer. I enjoy their sporadic wrestling matches which provoke echoes of my
mother’s voice. “You girls fight like cats and dogs!”
Oh, those were the
days. Once, when my parents left us alone, one of my sisters dared take Dad’s
barber shears from the bathroom to use in the living room. Well, guess whose
rear-end landed on the point of those scissors?
As I seemed
unharmed by the puncture with no show of blood for evidence, my siblings and I
agreed it best to keep the incident our little secret.
All’s I can say is
God’s angels worked overtime with the O’Brien girls when Mom and Dad left us
alone—which they seldom did. Otherwise, we may have been maimed or fatally wounded
ourselves.
Back then in the late
1950’s, early 1960’s, I couldn’t imagine keeping myself out of mischief with
reading books like “Old Yeller,” “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and
the Nancy Drew series. My parents read the newspaper. The neighborhood where we
grew up in Warren didn’t provide a local library. Two strikes against
developing readers of my sisters and me.
Nonetheless, I sit
in my study including dictionaries of three different languages, literary
anthologies, “how to write” books such as William Zinzer’s “On Writing Well.”
The top shelf of
the bookcase my Uncle Jim built for my mother holds her collection of American
and English classics, most I have yet to read.
For they have firm
competition for my time. Jane Austen’s “Emma,” for instance, the novel that
called my name last week which I have completed midway. Indeed, Austen’s wit
and circuitous romances make engaging company in March.
A slow reader, I
cannot plow through a book, sometimes reading until my eyes ache. Last night
around midnight I read this dialogue, “My good friend, this is quite
unnecessary; Frank knows a puddle of water when he sees it, and as to Mrs.
Bates’s, he may get there from the Crown in a hop, step, and jump.”
Dear Reader, such prose
humors me. Written between February 1811 and August 1816 in England, Austen
endured several months of March while developing her plots, places, and characters.
All lost on my sweet
cat, Cuddles.
