Thirty-six hours

It's been something of a roller-coaster here at Falling Downs.

Thursday night, after I'd stepped out for my bed-time toke, Chloe the Cat slipped out the door as I was slipping in.

That's not like Chloe. She'll maybe venture onto the front stoop on a sunny afternoon, but that's about it.

I didn't give it much thought, but reminded the Farm Manager to let the cat in before she retires for the evening.

Friday morning comes and there's no Chloe in the house. Apparently she was nowhere to be seen when the FM went to let her in.

We spent the morning looking for her, around the house, the garage, the barn, calling her name and shaking a bag of cat treats.

Nothing.

Chloe is somewhere around twenty years old. We braced ourselves for the worst. I spent the afternoon researching "behaviour of dying cats."

There's a vast trove of info out there about how ageing cats are wont to steal away and die alone when the time has come.

We had obviously come to that time.

I must admit we both got a little misty-eyed contemplating the demise of our beloved companion of twenty years. She could be, depending on her mood, aloof, cloyingly affectionate, distainful, or openly hostile. All
within a fifteen minute span.

Now she was gone... oh how I wished I could have rubbed her belly one last time.

Too late for that.

Even as tears flowed freely, I was able to discern the outlines of a silver lining.

We didn't have to pay $350 for the vet to put her down.


So we'd made peace with the fact that Chloe was gone to her reward. I was sitting out on the stoop around midnight last night, well into my cups, having that bed-time toke, when I thought I heard a meow.

When you're half in the bag and you just fired up a fattie you don't believe the first thing you hear, and I didn't.

Then I heard it again.

And again.

I got up and wobbled off in the general direction of the meowing.

It was coming from the barn. It briefly occurred to me that I should inform the FM of our good fortune but I thought better of it.

This could be a hallucination, triggered by grief and wishful thinking and good weed.

When I got closer to the barn I actually saw her, the dead cat I'd been mourning moments before. Then she ducked into the barn.

The barn here at Falling Downs is of course falling down, so we don't venture in there without good cause. This was good cause. By then I'd alerted the FM and between us we retrieved our dear Chloe.

We celebrated well into the morning!


We woke up just in time to see the Lundys off-loading their cow-calf pairs in the barnyard. The cows had wintered at their home farm, but were now set free to graze in our lush meadows for the summer.

It's one thing to see wee calfs romp and frolic and kick up their heels. It's quite another to witness a 1400 lb. cow do the same. They were just delighted to be here!

We were even more delighted to see them here.


And tonight, twenty-year-old Chloe caught a mouse.

Why I drag my feet

I drag my feet over all kinds of shit.

Just as a for instance, I've had my doctor hounding me about a colonoscopy for years. Ain't gonna happen. There are just some things you don't have to know. If my bowels are indeed consuming themselves from the inside out, what good does it do to know this?

Sure, you could "take measures."

That tends to involve hugely invasive medical procedures that will a) make the payments on my doctor's BMW for several years, and b) completely destroy my quality of life.

So I'll take the quality of life, and the quality of mine is pretty damned good, thank you very much.

Just this afternoon me and the Farm Manager were sitting out in front of the barn, out of the wind. Every now and then a car goes by, but most of the time all you hear is the wind in the trees and the birds singing to one another.

Once in awhile an airplane flies over. I've used the Flight Tracker website enough now to know roughly where they're coming from and where they're going.

The northwest to southeast flights are usually heading to Toronto from points west in Canada.

The southwest to northeast flights are usually heading to Europe from somewhere in middle America. From Chicago to virtually any European destination takes you right over Falling Downs. So does Los Angeles to Zurich or London. Those are the ones where you wonder who's on that airplane.

It's not just passenger jets flying over. This afternoon I saw a red-tail hawk swing by with a couple of small birds in hot pursuit. They were mightily pissed, and Mr. Hawk was doing his best to evade them, without a lot of luck.

Quality of life.

Not much in my Globe and Mail today. Paul Waldie brought me up to speed on that French election. Apparently the far-left fringe candidate Melenchon is a communist and wants to align France with Venezuela. That's the take on the French election from Canada's newspaper of record.

I pity the poor folks who rely on the Globe for their news. They don't actually send Waldie to Europe to "research" this shit, do they? That was about as lame a take on the French election as anyone could possibly imagine. An unpaid intern with an interest in politics could easily put together a more informative article from a computer terminal in their local public library in Toronto.

If you want some insight into the election in France, don't read the Globe and Mail, read this instead.

Chloe is the real reason I drag my feet. She's the cat I got out of the clinic where Karla Homolka worked. She's got to be twenty years old by now. She has outlived all the dogs we've ever owned; Buddy, Charlie, Gus, Roxy, Peaches... and she's on track to outlive the two hounds at Falling Downs today, Boomer and Lucy.

For the first fifteen years of our life together she studiously avoided me. The last few years she's really warmed up, to the point where she follows me around from morning till night. She's literally under my feet every moment of the day.

I drag my feet to avoid stepping on her.

Tomorrow we're off to the city to move Junior out of residence at U of T. He's studying economics...

Where did I go wrong?