What the cat misses out on
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When I was a young girl growing up in the ’90s, living in the angst of the transition from not quite a child anymore and clearly not a grown woman, I have a distinct memory of looking at my family’s house cat, curled up on the throw blanket draped across the couch, and wishing I could be her.

I did the same with Dad’s cow dog, staring up at me in the garage, waiting for a scratch in the middle of my brooding over some fight with a friend, or the way my outdated clothes fit my body now, or how my hair fuzzed, not even close to the way it lay smooth on the girls in those magazines.

To be a cat, I thought, would be far less complicated. I didn’t want these feelings, the ones that were creeping over me, reminding me that the world was getting bigger, the expectations of me were quietly changing and I was starting to see it now, not certain I was ready.

To just know, like a cat, what you were supposed to do — eat and sleep and poop and curl up and meow at the door to be let out and then meow to be let in again — seemed like a less problematic existence. Even if you got left out too long in the rain, or you discovered your food dish to only be half full, not to the brim the way you prefer. Even if you didn’t have a human at all, or a bowl or a dish… a cat just needed to be a cat, and she knew how to do it.

I wasn’t so sure about the whole human thing.

Because a cat didn’t have to have the right jeans or haircut to find an acceptable place in the social circle, a dog didn’t have to pretend to understand algebra or have fights with her mother that ended in slammed doors and misunderstandings. A cat didn’t feel compelled to write sad songs on the pink carpet on the floor of her room, simultaneously hoping no one ever heard them and also that everyone would…

I’m all grown up now and when I turn on the news or listen to those sad songs or disagree with my husband, or hear a story about how we’re screwing this up, I think, in the next life, I might come back as a house cat.

Because sometimes, it seems, there is not one thing that we humans haven’t made more complicated.

Last week I sat on the back of my horse and in the crisp fall air, against the relentless wind and a sky that would eventually snow on us, I helped move our cattle home from spread-out pastures.

The notice was short for me to successfully manage all the things I thought I should be doing, but I had enough free will to chose what mattered to me that day, so I rode behind a string of black cattle, my now well broken-in body finding a familiar comfort there, free for the day from worrying about how my hair fell or what the polls or the numbers or the doctors say.

Because the job was to gather and trail and round up and sort and check and doctor and laugh and count and holler and wipe our noses on our hankies and say our toes were cold when we finished the task and went in for chili and coffee and cornbread.

And I thought, as I refilled bowls and mugs and asked around about dessert, that for a tough year I’m grateful for moments like this. It’s moments like this, perhaps the cat misses out on…

Stay safe. Stay strong. And for crying out loud, let’s take care of one another.

Jessie