It took us all of Saturday and most of Sunday to decompress and rest from the intensive poetry workshop.  This year’s group was quite accomplished and open and appreciative.  They were a pleasure to work with. 

Then we both got to work doing everything we would have normally done last week and the stuff we must do this week.  I also renewed my kitten hunt, suspended for the two weeks leading up to my workshop and the week of the workshop.  I had put down a deposit for a black kitten they named Ranger, located in a shelter in Westfield MA.  Tuesday, the woman who runs the shelter called me to say Ranger was ready to go.  I had a few questions for her.  Was he named Ranger because he tried to escape?  There were as many negative comments posted about the shelter as positive ones.  She explained her take and we moved on to questions about what food the kitten had been eating, etc. A friendly conversation.  She called back to set a time to meet us with the kitten.

She said I sounded like a real cat lady.

At 9 am on Thursday, she called to say I had been very rude to ask so many questions and she would refund what I’d paid but she would NOT ‘give’ me any kitten.  She was yelling at me.  I hung up.

I had been regularly checking several shelters. Thursday, I noticed that the North East Animal Shelter in Salem, MA, had three kittens.  I put in an application and got an appointment for 11:30 Friday.  I checked Thursday evening and all three were available still.  Got up @ 5 a.m. and we drove to Salem, getting lost three times from the Google directions.  Very complicated and routes and streets are poorly marked up there.  But we arrived long before they opened.

We were welcomes and ushered into a room where they were TWENTY kittens available for us to choose between. We learned they had brought up a vanload form poor conditions in South Caroline on June 10th.  These were the ones who had already been neutered, had their deworming, were vaxed and checked for FIV etc.  We met several kittens, but Shaman purred when picked up and clung to Woody.  He was a handsome kitten and we took him.  A volunteer at the shelter told how how to go back in a way that was shorter, more direct and much easier to follow.  Still, it was Friday afternoon and we hit a lot of traffic once we got near the Cape bridges.  Then it was creep and crawl.

He played with a wand, managed to get out of the carrier three times and half the time slept.  I’ve never had a kitten so comfortable with traveling, except for Jim Beam and Collette, brother and sister.  When we opened the carrier in Woody’s room, he jumped right out and started exploring.  No hiding for him.  He began to play immediately.  He didn’t eat till evening, but since he has eaten heartily.  He is very skinny and obviously was not fed much in the South, you can count every rib. 

I am enormously angry about this extreme court that is imposing their revisionist

views on everybody else.  Somehow this has to stop. They are trying to force the country back to 1950.  Women in their place or dead. Blacks silenced and lynched if they are “uppity.” Latinx as gardeners and cleaners. LGBTQ people hiding or persecuted or jailed.  I was born and grew up during that time.  White men want their power to rule over everybody else back.  They want to wear guns in public to enforced their superiority.  They want everybody to be Christian fundamentalists with the woman squashed and the Bible enforced as they interpret it.

As someone who was poor, at 18 I had to abort myself and almost died.  I fought for women’s right to choose and have adequate medical care for decades.  I helped women get abortions for years before we had a movement to pressure.  I had a close friend who died of a botched abortion.  I had another friend who miscarried a baby she wanted and was left on a gurney in the hall of a Chicago hospital bleeding because they accused her of having an abortion.  It was hell.  They are bringing hell back for huge numbers of women and forcing child ren both born and unborn into poverty.