Melenie's Dilemma

Melenie is faced with having to re-home Louie, a cat she has totally fallen in love with and he with her. For ten weeks he has been her constant companion and lap cat.  He has slept with her every night.  But because he stalks and chases her 14 year-old cat Pearl and terrorizes her, they cannot share a house.  I keep thinking how miserable we would be if we had to re-home Shaman.  I had to re-home a cat Amber, about 45 years ago.  And I still feel bad about that.

We had our first real snowstorm of the winter this week and  the ground is still covered.  It came down fast and heavy and wet. It stuck to trees, bushes, everything it touched. It ‘s still beautiful but makes getting around difficult.  I couldn’t go see Karen at home [she’s got out of the hospital finally this week] becauae her drive wasn’t plowed and was impossible and dangerous to try to traverse on foot.

 Woody had a minor accident with the old truck when the four-wheel drive failed to engage when he was trying to get back home from his office on an icy hill.  He was not hurt and only minor damage was done to the truck, hardly visible; but the four wheel drive has to be fixed or we need a new truck.  It’s over ten years old. The truck ended up at the DPW overnight because it wouldn’t make it up the hill to our house and Woody had to walk home half a mile in the cold and snow.  Then Wednesday, he shoveled the drive—easily one hundred feet long.  Then he had walk half a mile again to fetch the truck. He was totally chilled when he finally came; he really did himself in.

The roads are plowed now so once you get on pavement, you’re generally okay here.  But getting down a drive is impossible with the ice under the snow – it started as rain and then froze. We did make it to Orleans the next day…in the Subaru.

I have all the submissions to the two contests in hand-- the WOMR Jose Gouveia poetry regional contest and the national contest,  I read all the submissions. I don’t use a slush editor as I discovered the academics the station once hired for preliminary reading had of course a very academic attitude and threw out any political poems and didn’t think much of humorous poems.  I finished reading the regionals  and I’m ranking the best ones today.  I’ll start the enormous pile of national entries maybe this weekend, although not Saturday as I do the personal laundry and we have dinner guests.  I’m trying to decide on the leg of lamb recipe. Bonnie and David are good non-fussy eaters – the best kind. The worst are people who just mush the food around their plate and eat almost nothing.  Perennial dieters.  You work all day to make a great meal and they treat the food like like something vaguely dangerous.

I did manage to write two poems this week in spite of all the hubbub around the snow and the accident and all the regionals, the whole pile once through and the ones with merit gone through three times to winnow them down to winners and honorary mentions.  I’ll then rank the remaining poems, from first prize through third and then 6 or 7 honorary mentions.  That’s hardest of all the work.