My cuppa was warm as I looked outside into the dark cold whispering to myself "Something better might be coming..." I was as adrift as the snow falling by the barn light of our country home.
I love that barn and all its occasional holes that are, as the saying goes, big enough to throw a cat through. At that moment a cat was indeed making his way to one of those holes. It was the neighborhood gray tiger trudging with his odd little gait through belly-deep snow to settle in a rocky bed under our middle barn.
We had been chasing this cat from the property for almost 3 years, back across the street to where he presumably lived. Of course we presumed he lived elsewhere, because, we are not cat people. We did not have a cat. We did not give him permission to live under our barn. But cats live where they want and it seems he had come with the property when we bought it.
Truth was the cat lived there more than us. We only came to the house a few times a month. He was skinny and finding food in the snow would be tough. Sighing, I accepted that he was our barn cat and
took a 12 oz tin of canned chicken and put it in the barn.
In the morning it was empty.
We named him Eason after the builder of the barn. Through a progression of feedings that would weary the patience of any readers, by Spring I was hand feeding this timid creature tidbits of roast beef and rotisserie chicken. Mornings, hiding under our porch steps, he scarfed down two to three tins of cat food before wandering off on his rounds.
To him we were a food stop. He still shirked away from our touch. To us, he was part of the property and we still commuted back and forth to Sleepy Hollow. While downstate for Bob's back surgery and recovery, we left Eason with 12 pounds of dry cat food in a gravity feeder in the barn. We came back to even more cats living on the property.
Bob's back healed some, but he could no longer travel. Eventually, Bob and Eason and all the strays stayed at the country property. One then another of the stray neighborhood cats were hit by cars and killed in the street in front of our house. We worried at Eason's wanderlust.
Like me, Eason had places to go. We would see him tentatively crossing the road, lifting his feet high. He would wander the edges of yards changing direction at right angles at fences and surface changes from grass to black top to cement. He wandered the busy school parking lot between buses and pick ups, and sunned on neighbors porches. He moved slowly. He move carefully. When you got very close you could see that he could not see. His eyes weeped and bulged and were clouded.
Then he got sick. His breathing was raged and he wheezed. The decision was made to bring him inside.
In August, we went out in the yard and picked him up from his sunning nap. He fought. He bit and clawed and spit. We put him in a box. Inside the house, he had a little suite of three rooms, but was an unhappy cat. He climbed gates, scaled plexi glass, fussed with door knobs and hinges and locks until he opened them and meowed miserably for stretches of up to 8 hours.
The fuss and fight this little guy put up about coming inside was heart breaking. His blindness made things harder. And he fought with Smitty, the other neighborhood cat who had been haunting our yard and now lived inside. They had lived reasonably well together in the yard .
But he did, finally, after days let us touch him. The vet ruled him healthy, but blind and with a sinus infection.
Eventually we bought a leash and harness and took Eason out to walk. He as lost. The barn holes had been repaired, the gravity feeder was gone and his stray cat buddies moved on to something hopefully better. He sat down and would not move. We carried Eason back inside and there he has been since in his better place. He is happy, loved, cuddled, loving, sleeping on soft blankets in sun spots and finally purring and safe.
Eason is surely not the only sentient being fighting and scratching and clawing for things not to change. But, things are always changing sometimes coming as softly as the little cat feet that pad around my kitchen now. Sometimes they shift as abruptly as being plucked from a warm nap in the sun. Bob is in a better place, truly retired and golfing more that running. He lives upstate. I still commute. The Fellowship of The Running Classes is still disassembling. I miss what was. I keep moving forward. That is what running is about. Things are always changing. The truth is, like for Eason, something better might be coming.
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