Spring                                                                               Planting Moon

Kona.  Wagging her tail.  Wagging her tail.  She hasn’t done that for months.  Months.  Maybe a couple of years.  With her tumor removed she’s bouncy and playful.  She even got up in my lap to sit for a bit, again something she hasn’t done in some time.

It’s this against the money for the Chicago trip.  I chose this and I’m glad.  To see her returned to a happy place, even for a few months.  Worth it.

The tumor was cancerous and it was an incomplete excision which means the tumor will grow back and the cancer is not gone, but it’s a slow grower and not focused on any organs, so she could well die of something else.

We have, over the last few years, chosen not to treat dogs with cancer, cancer that has metastasized.  Too expensive for too little result, especially in the giant breeds.  But Kona could live, at 12, to 15, so there was a future for her.  That of course is for tomorrow.

For today?  That tail.  And her smile.

Spring                                                                             Planting Moon

A neighbor stopped by this morning to report that our dogs, Vega and Rigel, had treed a raccoon.  Uh oh.  They’re half coyote hound, which is basically a coon hound used to hunt coyotes.  A doggie genome activated by its primary motivation.  Watch out.

So, Kate and I wandered out, me still my house slippers, into the yard, past the orchard, around the truck gate to the corner of our land where the electrical junction box sits.  Kate got there first and found, not a raccoon, but a rotund gray tabby up a skinny ash maybe 15 feet, clinging to two forked branches–the first on the trunk–wide-eyed.  The pose and the expression were close enough that I expected it to wink in and out of existence.

Talk about two happy dogs.  Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.  Barking up a tree at last.  Yes, up a tree at last.  We’ve got one.  Something.  Up the tree.  Come see.  Come see.

Now I don’t have a lot of sympathy for cats that enter our yard.  We’ve always had dogs, usually several, and you have to cross either a six-foot or a four-foot chain link fence to enter.  So, you come inside, you deal with the dogs.  Stay outside.  No problem.

This cat, obviously a house cat, will live.  If it has the sense to get down from the tree and leave.  Some don’t.  I can’t say I feel good about that but I don’t feel exactly bad either.  Paying attention to your own survival is rule number one in the animal world, and if it isn’t always number one, it’s second to whatever trumps it at the moment.

Which, of course, is not to say that animals always know the threats to their own survival.  Our dogs, for example, escaped from their safe hectare, would wander blindly onto a highway, or, as has happened, will slip down deep ditches filled with water and be unable to get out.

I hope that Chesire cat, having slipped through its own looking glass, has found its way home by now.