TODAY

Just for the hell of it, one last thing

So on top of today, the day after the election, there seemed to be a serious rift between two of my grandkids. Nothing to do with politics. This upset me almost more than the election. I wanted to lie down with a pillow over my head. One my kids, after talking to them, told me it would be alright, but I couldn’t stop worrying. Worry is like that, it hangs around. So there was Trump, dangerous filthy mouthed liar, about to be our new president, and two of my grandkids needing to fix something seemingly unfixable between them. I couldn’t even stand up to go lie down. So I looked out my back window which has a view of our yard, half of which, or almost half, we keep uncut, turning it into a meadow. Large areas of the long grasses are tamped down where deer sleep, and doubtless littler creatures too. I love everything about it, so I managed to go outside. I looked up through the bare branches of the crabapple tree which at one  point I wanted to cut down. It was getting in the way of my view of a beautifully successful Hydrangea bush which I planted years ago. The hydrangea is now very big, with huge white  flowers just turning that pinkish color that fall encourages. But looking up into the bare branches of the crabapple tree, stark black, and  complex  with tiny twig like features,  all of it vivid under the gray sky, I knew it would remain. It has been here longer than I have, and none of this yard really belongs to me, it belongs to its own self.

     Then I spied a small creature in the meadow. I might have been a large bird, a fowl of some sort, or a dog, or who knows what, and I stared and stared and stared, watching until it finally moved its head and I saw ears. Not a bird. I kept staring until it finally stood up on what were obviously four legs, which meant it was possibly a dog, or a cat, or a baby something else. I wondered if I should adopt it if it looked starving, and then a moment later it was unmistakably a cat, and it began to move. My dog Olive, and my daughter Catherine’s family dog Mr,Scrambles, oblivious of its existence until then, caught sight of the cat and the chase began. They couldn’t, of course, catch her or him, but came close. At first I was afraid Olive had ignored the underground electric fence and gone speeding through the forsythia after the cat into another yard close to a busy road, but when I called her she was at my side in seconds. Good girl, Olive. Mr. Scrambles right behind. Good boy.

Anyway, I am grateful for the crabapple tree, then watching the unknown turn into the known, its escape from two determined dogs, all of it renewing (however briefly), my faith in something I still have no name for.