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Amazing Grace

Daily prayer.

As I type this, Grace is sitting on my legs and purring loudly enough that I can not only hear it but feel it. This is momentous because I spent the entire day looking for her while I was supposed to be packing for New York. She disappeared this morning and, because I’d left the front door open while moving things back and forth from my car, I began to fear that she was gone forever. If she had fled into the environs surrounding this Truro house, chances were high that she would be lost or severely injured. All kinds of animals live in these woods–coyotes included—and she’s never spent any time outside since we rescued her on the streets of Brooklyn when she was three weeks old. She was by herself, eating trash and hiding behind a stoop. The size of my palm, she was so little that she normally would not yet have been weaned. I believe that this is why she remains a permakitten. Like me, she was never safe as a child.

At first I assumed my little one had just found a new hiding place. But after after a few hours, I started to get nervous. I turned off all the electronics in the house and sang “Love You Madly,” the Ella and Duke song to which she has come running since she first became my charge eight years go. But she didn’t come. I turned the house upside down and still didn’t find her. And then I started to imagine the upheaval had so upset her that she’d run outside and had gotten lost. Maybe eaten. Continue Reading →

First and Forest

When I first came to Truro, it was only to be for a month. I had put the word out among my extended circle that I was looking to live in rural New England in September, and had rolled my eyes as I’d done so. Who’d be willing to lend me their empty house wily-nily for four weeks?

I had gall.

But as is often the case when change is necessary, that gall paid off. A friend from high school—someone I liked but had never known well—got in touch through Facebook, and next thing I knew Grace and I were hurtling to Truro in a car full of cat food, thin cotton dresses, and platform shoes.

That’s who I was on September 7. Tired eyes, disappointed smiles, trailing glamour like yesterday’s big idea. Grief-stricken about the hateful ignorance validated by the Trussian Oligarchy. Grief-stricken about who I no longer was. Continue Reading →

Saving Light

I was already sad due to o, o lord, another set of shootings and the departure of my g-dfamily after a lovely few days with them in Truro. But the daylight savings blues made this a truly melancholy twilight. I walked for hours in the woods and on the beaches of Wellfleet’s Great Islands Trail, and the sorrow walked right along with me. For once, my Mrs. Who shtetl chic didn’t shake me out of my despair, nor did the rusts, ambers, olives, and turquoises of the high grasses, dune trees, and sea crests as I trudged and trudged. Even the kindly couple whom I befriended on the trail–white-haired, bright-eyed–didn’t change this grey to gold; rather, we shared the rueful sweetness I remember from waiting for seemingly forever at very cold bus stations in the Boston winters of my adolescence. I’ve never been more struck by the wisdom of December’s festivals of lights. Surely we Americans need something to look forward to in the long dark nights to come.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy