Waking up the cats.
The cats are cold. I’m cold. We’re all cold. Zen was born in Alabama, and Torgi in California, so they aren’t used to it, but I really have no excuse. I was born in the snow belt of the northeastern US and lived in Chicago, and somehow I’ve lost all ability to function in not-even-freezing weather.
I am wearing fleece trousers over leggings, a fleece jumper and scarf, and a bathrobe, and I’m still cold.
We’re all cold and because we’re all cold we’re all sleepy, all the time. But that’s no good, see, because then the cats are wide awake at five in the morning and at that time Torgi has taken to shoving his paw into my ear canal as far as it will go as his way of saying, “Hello, I am hungry now.”
So it is my job, several times a day, to wake up the cats. I do it gently because they are old, more fragile than they used to be, and waking up from purr-lined, fur-lined sleep is a cruel enough experience.
Today I read on Facebook that a friend lost her cat in the most horrible and violent way I could imagine. In fact, I have imagined something similar, whenever we leave the cats in someone else’s care. And I am not a fool; I know that there is a big bad world out there full of nasty things that can steal our loves away. But the reality of it, even removed from thousands of miles and to someone else’s cat, was gratuitously awful.
I woke up my cats this evening whispering into their fur, “Thank you. Thank you for being okay.”
So we are cold. But we are okay. And today that’s enough.