Love me, love my cats

When I was in seventh grade, I had a t-shirt with "Love me, love my cats" emblazoned on the front alongside a picture of a little girl with a bunch of cats around her. This has always been an underlying motto of my life and, fortunately for me, I married a man that takes this particular role very seriously.

First of all, don't let him fool you, he loves animals as much, and sometimes I think, even more than I do. He had two ferrets as a kid named Ricky and Bouncer and I think that if you can tolerate nasty ferrets (not to mention our ear-piercing, vicious bird), then you must be an animal lover. The proof of his love for me through this love of animals, and namely cats, comes in the form of two stories.

The first one begins on our way to Wesley one evening while we were dating. As we passed through Five Points, we witnessed a most horrible accident: a cat being run over! I was so distraught by the situation that my boyfriend (now husband) turned his truck around and went back to the scene. The cat was still alive, although barely, and I couldn't stand the thought of it being run over repeatedly, so Brian mustered up all of his un-queasiness and picked up the cat and placed it in the bushes. Right then and there I knew that he was the one for me. (I actually knew it already, but this did help seal the deal as they say.)

The second incident happened today when we thought that our recently adopted cat, Jake, had been run over while we were at church this morning. We saw a cat that looked identical to Jake in the gutter near our apartment complex. I was a mess. So, my wonderful husband went to look and determine whether or not this cat was, in fact, Jake. He surveyed the scene, but could not come to any definitive conclusions. My mind could not rest, so he went back to the cat, took him out of the bag that he had put it in, and tried to make a decision. He could not, but, people, this is love. To study a dead cat just to ease your wife's mind!

The happy ending, besides that I have the most amazing husband in the world, is that it was not Jake. He is home now and we're not sure how much he'll go outside anymore!

In Memory of Frances

My grandmother went home last Tuesday night. She doesn't live in Magnolia Estates anymore and of that, I'm sure she is very glad. She doesn't need her oxygen anymore. When we were trying to talk to Grace about it, she said, "Grandma's oxygen make her better." "Yes," we replied, "yes it did." But it wasn't the oxygen and it wasn't the thousands of pills and doctor's visits she's had over the past so many years since she began to get sick, it was the Lord himself that finally healed Grandma last Tuesday. Now she is whole, now she is perfectly who she was created to be. And I am overjoyed because of all this.

But I am really sad at the same time because my grandma is gone. She won't ever sit and drink coffee with us on Sunday afternoon again or tell us stories of how she and Daddy Fred met. She won't ever have us slip her wine into the assisted living home or laugh so contagiously here again. I loved her hands so much. She had one crooked thumb from an automobile accident and that made her hands so prominent. Her eyes were beautiful and they sparkled with quiet determination. She loved everyone around her more and gave of herself more freely than anyone, except for my own mother (her daughter), I have ever known. During the last two days of her life, everyone from the man who owns the assisted living home where she lived for the past two years to the cooks and cleaning ladies came by her room to tell her goodbye and that they loved her. My grandma was a woman who poured out the love of Christ. And now she knows it fully. What was mortal is swallowed up in life.

"And, Lord, Haste the day when my faith shall be sight..."

Heavenly dwellings

Tonight I sit amid the almost cool, although still quite humid, Georgia air at the intersection of Milledge and Lumpkin completely unable to concentrate on my task at hand, epidemiology. At the beginning of the semester it was my favorite class, but now my mind is so filled with other things that I just can't concentrate. The Asian man who is frequently up here has just finished a soothing round of classical guitar and every few minutes some undergrad pulls by blaring an all-too-loud country or rock or emo song. Brian sits, hooked up to his ipod, reading Constitutional law. The sound of espresso makers pounding out the grounds is barely muffled through the wall. Ah, another evening at Jittery's.

Our grandmother is really not doing well and so I've been thinking a lot about Home. Not our apartment or even the house out in Watkinsville, but Home. Heaven. I have no idea what it will be like. Paul uses the illustration of this life being spent in tents to compare it to the heavenly dwellings not built by human hands in 2 Corinthians 5. He says that as much as we long to live in these heavenly buildings, we still don't want to be uncovered of our earthly tents. Frances Reinhardt (my grandmother) will know Home soon. She will know peace soon. And I can't wish her to stay here in our tent village because both she and I know that this is the truth. She will dance with Fred again soon. There will be no more pain, no more new diseases, no more assisted living homes. Just the light of Jesus' face.

"And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on, I'll sing on..."

Update on Des

Since I last wrote, our zoo here has been changing a little. Desmond finally took the grand flight off of the back deck earlier this week and we last saw him descending into the trees. He looked like he was flying well and, frankly, he was making a huge mess in our study room, so I am not all that upset about his departure. Meanwhile, Jake the fluffy black cat has joined us. Brian even got him a litter box. He (Jake) jumped on my legs at five am the other morning and started biting me. Needless to say, I discourage him sleeping inside. It is fun to have a cat around though.

The best story of the week is that there was a spider on me during a class earlier this week. Yep, I had one of those little "stop the class because I'm freaking out, except no one else can see the spider" incidents. Gotta hate it when that happens.