You know the feeling…so focused on doing-doing-doing that bits of your life are scattered from hither to yon, and you wind up chasing them down…sometimes with, well, painful consequences. That’s where this story started, on a day of serial deadlines…. Head-down at my desk, deeply absorbed in a project, I…
Passing by my adopted grandmother’s camellia bush in the side yard the other day, I saw to my surprise that it was blooming – two full, fuschia-pink blossoms and a faded one amid glossy dark leaves on its two long branches. I breathed a deep, unconscious sigh of relief and joy:…
Next Thursday it will be twelve years exactly. For three months my husband had been in the hospital fighting for his life after the placement of a left ventricular assist device – one of the very first experimental models. Problem was – nobody knew that he had MRSA, and worse, nobody knew…
It was a warm October day in a barn-garage near Philly: my cats were commenting loudly on their new boarding quarters as my friend, their temporary host, whispered welcoming reassurances to them. And that was when I saw her: a scrawny little cat, barely past kittenhood, her scruffy fur in…
Three years ago I was faced with a terrible choice. My elder cat Sweetie, who had been on steroidal treatment for late-stage oral cancer, had been responding astoundingly well, with no breakthrough bleeding for a week and a surprising renewal of energy and appetite. But late that Friday evening, I…
It was a scene I never wanted to see as I drove through the urban park that Halloween night: the still form of a deer by the side of the road, a pickup truck parked just beyond, and a man kneeling bent over the prone body. I pulled over and walked…
Thump! The noise propelled me out of my desk chair – that was a bird hitting the door, for sure. I’d watched with awe as the hummingbirds performed their dazzling aerobatics around my front porch that summer: whizzing past the bushes, between the feeders, around the columns, diving at each other in…
Purposeful and fearlessly friendly…when the big orange tom came up to me in my backyard late one evening and butted his head against my shin, purring, it was clear he wanted to get acquainted. And as I stroked his rough, dusty fur, and my fingers found the hot, swollen abscess…
I didn’t know that the dog was alive – or even that the object lying on the sewer grating was a dog – until he lifted his head as I drove past on my way to work on September 10, 2001. That weak movement, and his randomly arranged limbs, told me…
