Saturday, May 1, 2021

Three Beautiful Things 04/30/2021: Copper and Luna Vanish, A Pinehurst Morning with My Sisters, Making Sense of 2020

 1.  I had been tapping out words for this very blog you are reading and later got cleaned up and shaved and suddenly I realized that Copper and Luna were missing. 

Low grade panic began to set in and I looked everywhere on the ground floor of the house: under covers, in the closet, under the bed, under chairs, under the love seat. 

No sign of Copper and Luna.

Christy pulled up in front of the house so we could go to Pinehurst. I went out, told her that Luna and Copper had disappeared, and I didn't know if I'd be joining her and Carol for breakfast.

At this point, I tried to think through the problem I faced. I hadn't opened a door to the outside all morning. If they were outside, they would have had to have discovered a way to leave the house I didn't know about.

Then I momentarily lost my rational train of thought. I wondered if someone had entered the house while I was in the shower and swiped Copper and Luna.

I pushed that idea out of my head and went down in the basement. I couldn't remember opening the basement door, but, inside me, panic was increasing, my heart was beginning to race, and I didn't trust myself to remember whether I had or hadn't done anything.

Copper and Luna were not in the basement.

I came back upstairs. I stood still. I gulped a couple of huge helpings of air.

I thought I heard a meow.

I couldn't place it.

I concluded that with only one door closed on the ground floor, I'd look behind it. 

It was the door that opens to the stairway going upstairs.

I felt stupid checking this out because I never go upstairs and there was no way the cats could have opened that door to 

Oh! My! God! 

Copper was on the stairway.

I went up the stairs and there, on the futon at the top of the stairs, calmly sunning herself, was Luna.

May I repeat a significant detail of this story, please?

I opened the door to the stairway going upstairs. 

In other words, that door was closed.

I hope one day Luna and Copper will decide they want to return to the house's top floor and show me how they arrived there this morning.

Because, to anyone still reading this:  I. Have. No. Idea.

2. I took a moment and let relief wash over me and I flushed out the panic. I composed a quick text message to Carol and Christy saying that I'd join them asap. 

I vaulted into the Sube and blasted to The Goose and The Tree in Pinehurst.

By the time I walked in the cafe I was a cucumber, cool. I relaxed with a cup of coffee and ordered food from the Over 55 menu: two eggs, two link sausages, and white toast made from homemade bread.

It was a relaxing breakfast with Christy and Carol and once we finished we headed down to Watts Appliance just down the street and Christy bought a new refrigerator and stove for her kitchen.  

3.  Around six o'clock or so, I took a walk for a little over a half an hour on the trail to the high school, down the Jacobs Gulch road leading out of the high school, past the hospital, and turned east on Cameron and made my way home. I listened to a TED Radio Hour podcast which featured a handful of shows from the year 2020 as different people worked to make sense out of this tumultuous year. I learned more about the pandemic of 1918, about Chinese views of public health, bats as vectors transmitting disease to humans, loneliness, and gratitude.  These segments were all fascinating and enlarged my thinking about life in 2020.

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