Kittens in the Spring

The Sunday before Christmas is bitter cold and icy bright. I can see frost all over the front yard and yesterday's wet leaves are frozen in place like sculptures. The dogs are curled up together on the bed behind me and the cats are strategically draped over the heating vents. I'm in long johns and three layers, worrying uselessly about the water pipes and the neighborhood cats and grateful to have a roof over my head. I jack the thermostat up to 76 - thinking with a grim kind of satisfaction that my mother would turn over in her grave - and drag out an extra throw blanket. I detest and despise cold and am none too wild about Christmas. This year more so than others, the prospect of a new year is not just joyless, but frightening. I feel as if the very planet is in peril. Like the cold itself, it's impossible to shake off, cast out or ignore what I fear the new year will bring.

Hope is a two-faced hypocrite, seducing you with promises of better days or snaring you into a pit of unrealistic expectations. You can wait and be trusting that good will overcome evil or you can join the resistance and fight. Either way, it won't amount to much.

And yet.

Yesterday, knowing the cold was coming, I re-made the workbench in the garage with shelters for the stray cats - plastic tubs with fresh straw for insulation, thick cardboard boxes lined with fleece blankets and old pillows – not perfect by any means but dry and out of the wind for those that find it. And judging from the dogs newfound interest in the dilapidated dog door that leads into the garage, they've already found it.

And yet.

I sign the petitions, I make the calls to congress, I support those who still believe the country can survive. I don't know why except that it's better than doing nothing at all and sometimes it helps me sleep at night.

There will still be kittens in the spring, I tell myself.

“No winter lasts forever and no spring skips its turn.” ~ Hal Borland