The Renewal

The Seven-Year Growth

I've heard it said  that the body completely replaces itself every seven years, meaning that the process of cells dying and new ones growing throughout the body takes seven years to renew the body. Whatever that's supposed to mean, but it's a kind of marker I use in my life and now, I've been living in Mississippi since around mid June 2016, and with the end of June 2023, I've been here seven years, regrown my entire body cells one cycle. Such an arbitrary marker is just subjective, but it does allow me to think back to the night I finally got here and all the things I've done and seen and the people I've met and become friends with, here in Columbus, Mississippi. I've also lost three valued friends in that time and I have attended all three funerals. I also buried one of my calico cat twins. Her name was Ellie, the other half of my two girls Ellie-Mae. 

Ellie-Mae. Ellie is on the right.
Twin Sisters, One Heart

We arrived together when they were kittens on a late night in June of 2016 and because of them and their funny, loving, chaotic, cute, and cuddly personalities, I was never truly alone. Both girls kept me entertained and madly in love with them, my daughters, who had been through the rough early days here in Columbus, when the furniture had not been delivered yet and we lived in empty rooms and made a bed on an air mattress, and we all slept together. They were kittens then, and I have a lifetime of them together for almost 7 years. Ellie died of some trauma in her brain on September 15, 2022. 

I was never able to find out even from the vet what he thought was wrong with her, and then one day in September 2022, she fought to get outside. They had been indoor cats for most of the seven years we were here. And she disappeared that evening September 14. I tried to find her that night and all the next day, until the late afternoon, when I was looking through my kitchen window and saw what was a shape of different colors and mostly white, and I found her in the middle of the back yard, very still and seemingly very sick. I had been afraid that, yes, she had fought to get outside to go away to die, and I was right, although I found her when she was still alive.

I picked her up and held her close, and she even purred, but as I approached the door into the house from the carport, she fought me again, as if to say, "I need to go away, Dad. I don't want you to see me die." But I just did not want to lose her and then wonder if she wandered away and disappeared. So I fought her in my arms and took her into the kitchen and got some food in a bowl and set her down next to it. I was surprised but she seemed to have a good appetite, and I wondered if she just needed to recuperate.

She fell asleep with her face next to the bowl of food, and then later she made her way to the cat box and I sat with her and petted her and she purred (she was a loud purring cat), but her sound was greatly diminished. 

Eventually I went to bed and Mae joined me in the bed, I think, but not Ellie. I woke up the next morning; Mae was nowhere to be seen in the bedroom, bathroom, hallway, and so I went to the bathroom where the cat box was, and I found Ellie, stiff and lifeless in the cat box. It was not full of presents, but she had died there.

I had to get Ellie out of the litter they call "Pretty Litter" and I wrapped her up in a shirt she loved to play under, where she could poke her head out of a sleeve, or watch her sister go by, with just her nose visible to me from under the shirt. I also let her head out of the sleeve, so she could be looking out.

Both girls played in that shirt and under a straw hat, or they liked to be ensconced under a blanket. It was a rule of their game that any shenanigans they got into started by them getting under the shirt or the hat and waiting for the games to begin, which meant I dangled a toy on a string and passed it by the opening in the shirt or made it visible to one of them under the hat...well by this time they were both big, farm-fed girls and "hidden" meant that at least their head was under something.

So, I wrapped her in the shirt and set her aside to get ready to bury her in the backyard, but first I had to find Mae. By now, of course she had become Mayberry and Ellie had become Ellie Girl.

Mayberry was in the other bathroom, curled up in the sink and she would not come out of there, so I prepared her another cat box, water  dish, and food bowl, and left her there.

I could hardly function between bouts of ugly crying over Ellie's death and trying to soothe Mayberry. She seemed traumatized and stayed in the sink in the other bathroom without hardly touching her food or water, but I noticed that she had gotten out of the sink to eat and use the cat box, but she would not leave that bathroom. I think I knew why. I think she had found Ellie sometime in the night after she had died and she had gone away in what I suppose would be fear or instinct to depart from Ellie in death. 

The long story is that I buried Ellie, wrapped in the shirt, lying on the bottom half of a cat carrier over which I had also laid the top half so that she kind of had a very airy coffin where her body would be open to the elements and could decompose and go into the earth, but critters could not get to her. The husband of a friend of mine in the writers group came by that afternoon, September 15 to purchase a yard tractor I was selling, and he and his grandson helped me dig Ellie's grave on the east side of a large tree in the back yard. We buried her with her head facing the east so that she could greet the sun every morning and rest in the shade of the tree throughout the day. 

On September 16th I was out in the back yard trying to keep my crying quiet so the neighbors couldn't hear me, when I happened upon a scraggly rosebush in the backyard and atop that little bush was a single lavender rose. It was a beautiful shaped rose, a beautiful color, but it had suffered the loss of a few petals and looked a little forlorn. It was the last rose of summer at least in my backyard, and so I clipped it with a long stem and laid in on Ellie's grave. Thereafter, I have always referred to Ellie, my precious, loving, gone-too-soon little girl as Ellie Rose.

The Cycle of Life

Little did I know that, on that same September 15, 2022, the night Ellie died, a stray cat here in Columbus, Mississippi, found her way onto the front porch of a local plumber, where she gave birth to a litter of kittens, among them a tiny little girl kitten, who had calico colors and tabby stripes. She was then a "tabbyico" as I like to call her. The plumber's name is Chuck, and I had met him through my next door neighbors, and he did a plumbing job for me. A few months after that, around January 2023, he let my neighbors know that he had been raising a litter of kittens and would be getting them each spayed or neutered and would then try to find them homes. 

My next door neighbor let me know about the kittens and, even though I had not intended to replace Ellie, I did like to think that Mayberry needed a companion, and so after the kittens were post surgery, I chose the little tabbyico, who I named Emily, and as part of a nod to Ellie I tacked on the name Rose, so that she is now Emily Rose. Ellie Died. Emily was born. Cycle of life...

I now often call Emily Rose "Sister Big Britches" to establish the fact that she's too big for her britches; she's the most athletic cat I have ever had, and she would fly if she could. She finds her way to the very top part of the furniture in every room, sometimes also finding her way to the very top of the windows, getting herself into messes that I have to rescue her from. She runs through the rooms, taking bank shots off the walls, floating squirrel-like up onto the furniture. 

She teases her big sister Mayberry, and sleeps with her despite Mayberry's druthers. But Mayberry has finally accepted her, and when you see them side by side, you see that Emily has EXACTLY the same shades and tones of blacks, orange, and caramel. 

And a final picture to show their sizes. Emily is in the basket and Mayberry is on the hat they like to play under. Writing this has not been easy. I didn't intend to get into my girls lives, but since this has become a missive on the renewal of life, the cycle and the process, it does seem fitting.

Ellie is with us in our hearts and Emily is doing her best to be a good daughter to me and a good sister to Mayberry. I think she has succeeded very well.

Spring Turning to Summer

Triple Digits in May?

Luckily not this year. 

There were times when I was a teen (1962 - 1966) on our family farm, when we would hit at least a hundred degrees in the desert sun in mid-May. But then there was even one year when it snowed in May in the desert. I never forget the beauty of the desert, even while I am enjoying the lush greenery of central Mississippi, a hundred or so miles east of the Mississippi delta and the cotton plantations of the antebellum South. Here we sit on the confluence of two major river systems and do not want for rain.

The screenshot to the left is a picture of the still existing farmhouse, long ago bought by a nearby neighboring farmer. This shot is long-past the 1960s when I was there. I just erased the roof-mounted satellite dish to void the turn of the century date perhaps on this photo. In the foreground is a scraggly Mesquite bush, not quite leafed out, and just behind the telephone pole is a sagebrush plant, characterized by gray leaves and purple blossoms in that season. 

The Florida Mountains in the background are about 20 miles to the east. But from the farmyard, no matter which way you look, there are lone mountains, part of the fractured Rocky Mountain chain. 

To the south stand the Tres Hermanas mountains...three volcanic peaks, this picture taken in the summer when the farm fields are green. They are around 25 miles to the south of the old family farm, but from my perspective, this is how they appear. This is how the Spanish saw them, when they named them "Tres Hermanas" or maybe how settlers who were Hispanic named them when they came to southern NM to Luna County and started farming and ranching and taking advantage of the deep pure-water aquifers.

To the west is Red Mountain. And on the other side of that mountain is another bit of ranching and farming, but still in Luna county. West of Red Mountain, some 60 miles away lies that small town of Lordsburg, NM, and nearby there is where I set my Journals of Will Barnett series. The Journals are available in a single ebook (all three novels) or are individually available in paperback. It took me just one lengthy day of visiting the boot heel (near Lordsburg, NM) to envision my story of a young 14-year-old, name Will, and his life on the desert farm, with his three sisters and mother and father during the winter when his Uncle Sean came to stay after his release from a mental hospital after his stint in Viet Nam.

To the north is Cookes Peak, around 50 miles from my family farm, and near the Gila National Forest mountains, of pine trees, criss-crossed with small rivers and lakes. Year-round on the farm it was usually mild weather, except for a few freezing nights in the winter and summers so hot it burned my skin to a golden brown, as I went shirtless and irrigated our 80 acres of cotton and corn and alfalfa and grain. We raised hogs and cows, and chickens, so we always had a freezer full of beef, pork, and we killed our chickens for fresh chicken. But my mother also made butter from the cow's milk, and we gathered eggs every day. 

I don't mean to recall these as halcyon days, because there was plenty of hard times, but for my duration on this farm, from age 6 to 18—just 12 years, the years seemed to pass slowly and life seemed to last forever. And here I am thinking of it some 57 years later—all having passed in the blink of an eye and the chest expanding sigh. But my memories are as clear as the desert sky in the picture of my home farm.

I recall the desert and know that by May (usually) the Spring winds that brought dust storms from the west were mostly over and we were once again basking under crystal clear azure skies.

Truth be told, where would I rather live...the desert or the lush greenery of the Deep South? Both, I suppose. As I dwell there in both places in my heart's eye and my mind's heart.