Lola, Sweet As They Come

There will never be another Henry, but I needed a sweet animal in my life. I have Sage, of course, but Sage is independent and worldy and very feline. I adore her, and she loves me in her own kitty-cat way, but I need to be able to pet and cuddle an animal the way Henry loved.

Henry was an uncommon cat, and I don't think I'm ready for another.

So meet Lola, my new dog. She is SO sweet, smart, and funny! I just love her! She fills that need of having an animal to cuddle and pet, without feeling like I'm trying to replace Henry, since she's a totally different species!

Can't Even Grieve For Him Right

In my mind I can drive down Lee Highway and turn left onto Statler Boulevard. It’s sunny like it’s early morning, or maybe after a rain. I’m near the auction house but it’s not Saturday, so everything is deserted and only one abandoned stock trailer sits by the road. Saturday, there will be sixty trucks and stock trailers full of doomed cows and jovial farmers in their flannel and trucker hats with oil on their jeans.

I found Henry dead on the street a while back. I don’t know how to process this. My brain has filled already with this detached sort of tragedy, like, how sad, that girl who’s already been homeless this year and is sort of on the outs with her lover had to find her cat dead on the street on top of it all.

I cried the whole day I found him and now I don’t know that I’ll ever cry again. The van creaks and rattles. Later, after it falls of the jack in the rain on moving day, it will thump and knock in terrifying ways, but today it only creaks like an old van does when it reaches 16 years and 300,000-plus miles. We will almost kill it moving out of state. We will almost kill Sage and me, too, leaving Henry behind on a farm we aren’t allowed to step foot on again once we’ve gone. We have been evicted from Henry’s final resting place. We are traitors, leaving him in hostile grounds. We will never bring flowers or sit at his graveside on holidays. His ghost will be alone there if it ever comes at all.

I almost wreck, because it’s the only thing powerful enough now that I don’t cry. Manage to steady the van and coax it into climbing the slight hill to the light. Rain comes back, breaks open over this miserable town. Fakes a cleansing. Nothing short of fire would wash this city clean. I can’t wait to see it in my rearview. First there are boxes and boxes, and cleaning sorting and parting with the furniture that I foolishly thought meant we were settled.

The morning we leave, I sit at Henry’s graveside and don’t cry. I want to sense him, but he is conspicuously absent. Sage meows a sad song and slinks into her carrier. She knows we’re going. There was a time she would have fought, but the fight has gone out of her and she is resigned to this life.

It is still raining and the tire is flat. I will ride with a coworker to my last day of work and Daniel will finish the packing, change the tire, bring Sage when he picks me up from work, and off we’ll go. I pet the wet earth of the grave. It is rocky and already the prickly grass is growing back. There is nothing sweet or soft here anymore.

I cry, of course, at other things, but it will be months before I can face Henry’s absence or the sickening way that he came to be gone. I have to take Sage and Daniel and try to land us on solid ground and get us all food and shelter before I have the luxury of grief.

By the time we’re safe and solid, I have walled Henry up in this half-remembered morning, the sunshine dimming and the road beginning to crumble on the edges, and Henry is a stubborn cat. He cannot be coaxed out of those half-repressed days so easily. Grief comes only in snippets, in snatches. My throat aches as though I haven’t cried in months. It takes the same old songs and the same type of weather, and only then can I drive down Lee Highway and turn left onto Statler Boulevard. Only then can I let the tears come.