Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
The sides of the Boo Box are starting to bow out and I don’t know how much longer it will last but I’m astonished that it has held together this long. Boo is frequently in it and some of his sleeping positions put a lot of strain on the sides of the box. It makes me laugh to walk past the living room and see his head poking up out of the box in the middle of an otherwise empty room.
At the end of 2015, Sam and Trixie snuggling and sleeping on the top shelf of the cat tree in my office. Sam looks large next to Trixie but he’s a small cat, it’s just that Trixie is tiny.
After adopting Trixie I was curious to see if we would see any signs of tortitude – the supposed tortoiseshell attitude – in our tiny little cat but none has manifested itself. I call her Little Lover as she is very affectionate and loves to snuggle, both with us and with the other cats. She had been with us less than a month when I took this picture of her in my lap last winter.
I had to laugh when I saw a young Trixie watching me with her head sticking up out of the cat bed. Scout at times would watch me like this, all the more amusing since she insisted on having her bed right beside me, her face inches away.
It’s been a lovely 4th of July weekend. The weather has been perfect, warming to the 70’s during the day and cooling off into the 50’s at night. There haven’t been many neighborhood fireworks so far so we’ve been able to keep the windows open except during the hottest part of the day. To minimize the stress on the pets we’ll keep the windows closed when it gets noisy tonight and retreat to the bedroom where we have an air conditioner.
Despite having the day off for the 4th I got up at the normal time I get up for work, and by mid-day decided to take a little nap on the love seat in my office. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, as my wife came in and took this picture of me with our three cats all sleeping on me. Boo is the black-and-white cat curled up in the crook of my arm, Trixie is the tortoiseshell beside him, and Sam is the orange tabby in my lap, his favorite spot. Trixie’s beloved pink mouse even made it into the bottom of the frame. Our dog Ellie is not in frame but she was in her bed just below us.
Wonderful.
It never seems to matter, the tears I cry,
there’s a well inside of me that never runs dry.
The Weepies, “How Will He Find Me”
I visited Ridgefield a number of times as my Christmas break was winding down late in December. On the 30th I spent the morning watching a great blue heron by Rest Lake as the sun rose and then another a bit further on in a large meadow, then on another loop of the auto tour a great egret by the Quigley Lakes and ring-necked ducks and hooded mergansers in Bower Slough. After that the light was a bit high and bright for my tastes so I settled in to watch the male bufflehead above diving for food in a partially frozen Bull Lake. He’s elevated more than normal as he’s pushing through the melting ice in preparation for a dive.
Since he’d often swim to the far side of the pond to feed, to pass the time until he swam close again, I started looking back through my hiking journal. Normally it’s just a description of my experiences while out hiking or taking pictures, but sometimes the outside world makes its way into my writing. As I flipped through the pages I came to this section from the start of the year and burst into tears:
My last day of an almost three week vacation. Been great in many ways but worry over Emma’s health has left me a bit worn out. The refuge has been a welcome respite. She’s up to 9.5 pounds now thanks to the baby food, but her appetite waned a bit yesterday and this morning. Don’t know if it’s meaningful or not.
The opening entry in my hiking journal on January 4, 2015
I wasn’t that surprised that thinking about Em would bring me to tears, even though she had died a year earlier. I was over-tired and over-stressed and that often leaves me over-emotional. But I was caught off-guard because the tears just didn’t stop. I was already parked beside the road to watch the bufflehead, and since this pond is on the right side of the road, I had moved over to the passenger’s side. Since passing cars couldn’t see me, I let the tears flow until I cried myself out.
What broke me was seeing myself a year ago, almost afraid to even put into words a rising fear that our last hope of keeping our sweet little Em alive was about to fade, knowing now that the fear was justified and that we were about to run out of options and she’d be dead in three days. Sometimes it seems there’s nothing more cruel than hope: uplifting when given, devastating when taken away.
I realized then and now that is a sign of how blessed my life is that the death of my cat a year prior, no matter how beloved, was the source of my grief. The tears soon passed, the catharthis welcomed, and I laughed to myself and whispered “Emma, you were loved, you are missed.” Feeling better I resumed my tour of the refuge. Late in the day I finally saw a bittern after coming up empty on many visits, and wrote this in my journal:
Almost embarrassing how euphoric I was after finding the bittern, especially after being so upset over Emma earlier … overall a really fun day!
My hiking journal on December 30, 2015
And I wrote that even before the last light of the day, when I watched a heron and egret hunting as the sun set. I had to leave to get off of the refuge before the automatic gate closed, but as I drove past Bull Lake on the way out, I stopped for a few more pictures when I saw the bufflehead still diving for food, this time with the water painted orange by the reflections of the setting sun on the hills above the refuge.
The perfect bookend for the day, a day that started in ice and ended in fire.
When we adopted Trixie early last year and were keeping her in isolation for the first couple of weeks, I let our dog Ellie come in and join us since she and Trixie hit it off pretty quickly. I brought in one of Ellie’s dog beds so she’d have a comfortable place to sleep when she wasn’t on the bed with us, but it was used as much as an arena of play by the kitten as a place of sleep by the dog. Pink mouse became an early Trixie favorite and remains so to this day. I’m sometimes awakened in the middle of the night when Trixie brings pink mouse to bed and one of them isn’t quite ready to settle down for the night.
Boo demonstrates excellent form in the closed pike position as he tucks and dives into a deep sleep on Ellie’s dog bed.
Even though I’ve seen Boo in this pose many times, sometimes I’m still caught off guard and have a brief moment of panic because I think he’s had a medical problem and collapsed. But it’s just his chicken-wing pose, which he’ll do at random places around the house when he wants to relax for a bit. And then it makes me laugh, just one of the many goofball poses of our Boo.
I like to think he’s pondering the great mysteries of the universe.
“This is The Box Store, how may I help you?”
“I’m looking for a box.”
“You’ve come to the right place, sir!”
“Do you have anything Boo sized?”
“Boo sized … Boo sized … ah! Here we are! Boo sized!”
“I’ll take it!”
Boolie 