We buried the kitten. Actually, my son buried her. He found her in the grass beneath the small cluster of oaks. There was no sign of a struggle or any damage. He dug her a grave beneath the trees and covered it with limestone rocks to keep the digging scavengers away. All around are turks caps, rock roses, and spiderworts. A nice resting place.

An American Pope. My boyhood, Catholic school kid heart is happy. My mother would be beside herself as would be the nuns who taught me, mostly Sisters of Charity in their starched, white-winged habits. I doubt any of them ever imagined that a kid from the South Side of Chicago who graduated from Villanova would make that journey. But here he is and we can talk to his brothers and they’re telling us all about him. He likes the White Sox. A baseball Pope. It feels good.

There were days, and in the not too distant past, when I was up in the morning and moving fast. At home, on the road, wherever I was, the alarm rang and the day started. It was time to get up and write, or get up and go to work, or just get up and go. A day was afoot and it shouldn’t be wasted. There were words to find or roads to drive or things to get done around the house. I was a going and doing machine. The world was a set of class five rapids and I was good with the paddle.

We appear to be down one cat. One of the feral kittens has disappeared, although she’s old enough by now to no longer truly qualify for that appellation. It’s just that her mother is still here and I call her momma cat, thus her kittens are still kittens. Everyone was fixed early on, so it’s unlikely to be for reasons of love. And food is always plentiful, so I doubt she wandered off looking for better lodging. I guess it will just be a mystery as to where she went. I do hope she’s in good health, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the story. And that’s the way of the country.

A blessed rain is falling this morning in my piece of the Hill Country. Slow and steady. No breezes signalling a fast moving storm although thunderstorms are forecast for later this morning. We shall see. We’ve been a blank spot recently when it comes to meeting forecasts. Rain all around, but none for us. It happened last Friday evening. There was rain just down the road, but none fell on my little town.

An interesting thing has happened to me as I age. My paradigm of how I see the world has shifted. It started when I began wrestling with the idea that the sun didn’t actually rise or set. It was earth doing the moving, and I wanted to shift my language to say that. It continued to change when I realized, several months ago, that seeing was a passive activity. Light was coming to me. So, last night, as I did a three a.m. ramble and stood outside under the stars, my face turned skyward, I knew I was being bathed in starlight, in much the same manner as when I stand beneath a warm shower. Interesting feeling.

In this time of my disappearing, my aging, my eventual demise, I am not unhappy, depressed nor otherwise distressed. In fact, as I have been through all my other phases, my childhood moves, my sojourn in the Navy, my trip through higher education, marriage, children, and various career changes, I am excited for the opportunity. The past is very much the past, and now is what I have to live for, and I want to ensure it is time well spent. It is a chance to learn.