W i s p

          What makes life exciting is that you never know what is going to happen next. So many things are predictable. You can be fairly certain that the sun is going to come up the next morning when you go to bed at night.
          You can be sure that if you’re planning on a nice, easy, relaxing day at the office, there’s inevitably going to be a disruption of some kind. That’s called “Life on Planet Earth,” and it never changes.
One of the perks of life on this planet, however, is that there is always some new challenge just around the corner, especially when you’ve fallen into the mindset that things are “normal.”
          So far, 2018 has been a dynamic year. Look at the world around us. Politically, there seems to be chaos. This side against that side, and vice versa. Somebody has upset the apple cart (though I think it’s a good thing). Certainly my apple cart got turned upside down with my vision surgeries. But it was all for the best ... I now can see so much better, and even the eye surgeon is amazed.
          Toward the end of the summer, a couple of feral cats adopted me. Some of you may remember that a year ago I adopted a sweet female cat, “Occie.” I wrote about her. Then, she had to go to a different home. I felt so terrible about it that I didn’t want to share that with my readers, especially after making such a big deal about her.
          The bottom line is that I just cannot keep a kitty inside my home. Allergies are often treated with drugs by some, but in this case that was not an option. Yet God must have felt sorry for me because Mama Cat showed up in my backyard with her half-grown all black kitten. They didn’t seem to belong to any of my neighbors, and they were timid. I had seen the mother cat, a tuxedo, come and go in the past few months.
          Her half-grown kitten was her constant companion since summer, and I saw Mama Cat attempting to teach the little one to hunt. I watched them play in my locust trees in the back-yard and I kept on eye on them.
          Then the day came when I had thrown out some garlic bread scraps for the birds near my patio. That evening I saw the little black kitten eating the garlic bread that was old and dry. That’s when a tear came to my eye and I realized the kitten was hungry.
          Probably I teared up because I was reminded of my dear all-black cat, Jessica, who lived with me in Ohio and Pagosa Springs. Because of allergies, she too had to go to a new home. This was like having another Jessica come into my life.
          I put out some meat scraps I had and a small dish of milk. The next morning the food was gone, so I did it again. Mama Cat and her kitten grew braver and soon showed themselves shortly after I started providing meals for them. I was pretty sure at that point that they had no humans in their lives. I think that the half-grown kitten is probably a lone survivor from Mama’s litter.
          Several months have passed. I still cannot pet these cats. They are naturally skittish and run if I open the door. But they wait for me early in the morning for their breakfast and they come back throughout the day to nibble. My son Marty built them a cat house so they will have a place to sleep during the cold winter ahead.
          I’ve named them Mama Cat and Spooky.

AnnUlrichMiller.com