Coming Home, Literally and Figuratively

Mr. Max was around when I came home from the Farmers Market…So this is Wednesday but this is my Sunday post, just waiting for me to get my last setup and big backup done on this new computer, all done now and looking forward to the backlog of posts and photos and art and ideas, and memories.

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Mr. Max hasn’t been around and that’s not surprising. He lived with another human for seven years before me and I know he loved his human, and after having lost his human in such a frightening way—he’d had a heart attack in a parking lot of one of the stores on Main Street and never came home just before Thanksgiving in November 2020, and then life became very frightening for all the cats in the house. I have no doubt there was a big reunion with Bob.

But I’ve been feeling so sad and still kind of dipping toward that “I made a mistake, I could have done more” type of thinking, and just missing him so much, indoors and out. Especially now—September has always been a month of extra income for me. I had been hoping he could hold out until this time when I’d be able to at least have tests and find out more, after this meager summer. I don’t know that extra care would have extended his time, and part of my sense of things being incomplete stems from that and I felt he even wanted to know what was happening.

But mostly, he wanted every last minute he could get, and I feel he got those minutes, all the way back to the day he first came here, November 6, 2021.

Coming home

When I came in the door from my day as a vendor in the Farmers Market on Sunday I saw all four cats downstairs napping in their usual spots and greeted each one, went upstairs to see Morty and came back to the kitchen ready to put away the vegetables and other goods I’d purchased from other vendors.

But there was another kitty tingling in my consciousness who I hadn’t seen yet, so I stopped sorting vegetables to focus on who that might be and visualized…oh, it’s Mr. Max! He was here with us. I realized he’d come to visit. I remember walking up to the door and thinking how he’d be at one of the windows or the door to greet me and wishing he was, especially since none of the others do. Well, he was. These two rooms downstairs felt complete again.

I’ve been sensing him around and feeling a little more complete myself. I miss him so much! It’s not like I didn’t and don’t miss Mewsette and Jelly Bean and Giuseppe and Mr. Sunshine and Mimi and Basil, they are always in my thoughts and clear memories still catch me off guard. We had a recent stretch of dry sunny weather and that was actually so healing even though everything got so dry in the garden. But that space so full of memories was constantly available for me to go outside and walk around, and even do my exercises and yoga out there, and walking around the front yard and front walk with watering cans, the space felt so alive.

I’ll take these connections where I can get them. I still feel I have a long way to go with accepting all these losses and these dramatic changes in my household. I am looking forward to some quiet time in the colder months to be able to think more fully and do a lot of writing and other creative work toward this. This Saturday I have a bigger event, Woofstock, a benefit event for the Washington Area Humane Association, so this week I’m working on extra things for it, then this would be my last vendor event for the season aside from the open house I’m loosely planning for some time in October. But then I saw I actually have two planned and two potential events in November.

Decisions, decisions

My tent had been difficult to set up after the storm in August but had eased back into its normal use by last week. This week I couldn’t slide the canopy support up on any of the legs and then I heard a loud “snap” and the canopy support on one side started collapsing. This happened in 2021 with my last tent and I knew there was no fixing it. But I had noticed a 10×10 straight-leg canopy tent in Aldi finds for $59.99 a few days before and considered getting it to have a spare. Well, I had this extra income and told my vendor friends I was headed to Aldi to get a new tent, and I did. It’s nice and very easy to set up, good for tables underneath and lightweight things to hang around the frame, but not heavy duty enough to handle an art display. I don’t think things happen for a reason, and this was coming after that storm, but it is something that makes me think perhaps these weekly vendor events aren’t the way I should be spending my time. But I sold $165 in handmade goods on Sunday, that’s not unusual, and it’s nothing to sneeze at, as we say. And I meet all the cat lovers, there are so many, to trade stories and tell the stories of my fostering and the models for all the things they see. That in itself is not only healing but it’s enriching for me and all I do.

So I’ll still be working this out in coming months! So many little things…I had mentioned in July that my best computer had an issue that turned out to need a new hard drive and some other updates, and I finally (could afford to) get it back the first week of September. I had to reload everything, and there are always glitches, and I had to get it all set up to fully back up when I had most everything loaded and all the external drives attached. It’s been backing up the main drive with all my personal and customer files on it over Monday and Tuesday, so I decided to just let it finalize that rather than pausing it to edit photos and art and post here and on other sites. Now, that’s all finished and although I’ll have to replace this computer with one that can run Windows 11 (and eventually the others too) I’m good to go for now.

So this is my Sunday post, on Wednesday. Between that fix and also being able to focus and create things again I’ll be posting as regularly as I can and I’ll have a lot more to share. It’s been difficult not to have the time to! Without the weekly vendor events I can use that time to prepare my longer posts and be ready for the days I plan to post them, and also be able to once again spend time each day in my studio upstairs with artwork. Morty will love that! But it’s bittersweet for me.

Thanks for following Mr. Max’s journey here, and mine. It’s been a long two years of loss.

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