Winter comes on little cat feet

It’s a bleak, chilly day as I write this, and my cat Luna wants to play fetch. Whenever I sit in my favorite chair, crank up a heating pad behind my back, and put my MacBook on my lap, Luna trots into the room, tail in the air, with some toy or other in her mouth, letting me know that I ignore her at my peril. The girl demands a lot of attention. My older cat, Pippa, on the other hand, only comes around after dark. Oh, she’ll arrive on the landing every morning for her daily snack, before retreating to a cozy spot under a quilt on one of the beds for most of the day. It’s a great life.

A couple of weeks ago, she ventured down during the day to sit in the front window to watch glorious snow falling. I knew that with the white background, a photo of her would only be a silhouette, which was what I wanted. In the photo, Pippa looks very much like a rather famous statuette of a black cat that resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, one sculpted a couple of hundred years before Christ. I have a copy of the sculpture on a table and Pippa could have been the model. Some things don’t change much, even after thousands of years.

Nat King Cole was just on the radio, singing a classic from the early 1950s, “When I Fall in Love,” and it makes me tear up a bit. Any song that produces poetry like “In a restless world like this is,” as a lyric, is going to get my attention. I’ll leave it at that. I have always loved sad songs, especially during the holidays, from Cole to Tom Waits, from the Pogues to Vince Guaraldi, from Karen Carpenter to Jamie Cullum. And I’m way past an age where therapy can help me, though single-malt helps.

It’s a January morning just after a nod to the new year, and here we are again, not knowing what tomorrow may bring, and trying to understand and perhaps translate a quickly fading past. In a file cabinet in my basement is a rubber-banded handful of letters, letters written to me by my mother, from the time I was in college in the 1970s, until her death in 1990. Reading through them was fascinating and a little eye-opening. I could write a one-act play around the letters, about a great love between a sometimes wayward son and his brilliant, often-depressed mother, a love the son never truly appreciated until after her passing. This, from her in 1976: “I am so glad you called last night. I was pretty down, and talking to you always helps my morale. Dad says it always has.” She ended every letter with, “I love you.” There isn’t an award in the world that can top that. I am a lucky man.

January makes me think of a terrific quote by Great Plains writer and novelist, Willa Cather, wherein her book “My Antonia,” she beautifully wrote, “Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.” Let me add to that, and mention how, in country towns, ghosts of those who have gone before are still out there, wandering in the cold and fog of another January, waiting for us to join them, reminding us of their very existence, an existence that made our own possible. One day we will, in fact, join them, but not yet, as some of us still have to work through the foolishness of old age in this restless world, hoping for proper gravity, for those things that hold us here, which, for me, includes a couple of wonderful cats.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County and hosts the “Rural America” podcast. It can be found at https://www.ullrichruralamerica.com