I think only folkies, and maybe only Mudcat folkies in particular, can really understand this one...

Folkbaby Katarina is a big go-to-school girl now. We don't see her very often, altho even after a two year hiatus, I am still her Susan when we cross paths at WalMart. A lot has happened in her life, and in mine, since she and babysib had a spare home here on my lap and shoulder. I guess till now I never thought about it-- but once you learn how to deal with having an empty nest, you can have it empty out over and over again. You get good at hooking up good and close when that's called foro, and then you get good at letting go. Hm!

One of the things that happened since Katarina's tenure was.... there was an especially dear kitty we had kept and cared for, when my son David left almost 6 years ago to run nuke reactors in subs. She was a special-needs kitty, very inbred, very strangely wired even for a cat. She had no voice till she was about 6. She survived a deep depression when David left, as well as several times getting run off the property and lost as a result of another child's kitty we kept, and numerous scrapes normal to cats. She survived starvation when her stupid caretaker fatalistically mistook her weight loss for feline leukemia (when actually it was just bum teeth). That crisis ended happily the day Katarina's babysib was here swilling down formula and Akula climbed up in my face to meow in hunger and try to steal the bottle, so I could SEE her tooth that had prevented her eating. She HATED babies, but that day one saved her life. She went on to survive kidney failure, too, for a long time, with much care and worry on our part.

Akula was a riot. She was prone to getting stuck in incomprehensible behaviors, like sleeping in kitchen cupboards or in her fresh kitty litter, or like falling asleep draped around the kitchen faucet in mid-drip-drink. She would repetitively sail through the glass (in her mind that is), to get the birdies fluttering on the other side of the sun-dappled window that's about two feet from my elbow when I am a-pudering. Eventually I learned not to keep valuable things on top of the scanner she used as a launch-pad.

These bahaviors would be quite rigid tll a new one took its place. You never knew when she would shift. It could be weeks or years. For instance, one day I realized I could put the collection of cute espresso cups back where they belonged, but that Hardi's bell-jar clock had better go live in the china cabinet for awhilke.

One of her most persistent behaviors was sitting on laps. You could dump her off your lap a hundred times, and she'd jump right back up again. She gave us particular joy during her TV-sleeping period, when she'd lay herself across the top of the warm TV and fall asleep, only to fall off about a half hour later, in her sleep, nearly taking the TV down upon herself-- till the day we reconfigured the TV setup properly (after many tries) so that she could not actually get up there. And it was also very funny that she did not accept this new reality on first encountering it.

Akula was a small kitty, black and white. I used to enjoy looking at how her color pattern must have been formed while she was just a wee, legless blob-- clearly some of the puddles of white crossed over legs as if they had once been a single continent. She was beautifully formed... lovely little dainty toes.... And a sweet face; since she started with no voice, she developed a highly-expressive face and she could tell me lots of things she thought I ought to do. Sometimes I didn't understand, but she would get right up in my face till I got it.

Her kidney failure took a long time to finish running run her down. We knew her bloodwork indicated high numbers (badddd), but she still played, so we got the special food, tricked her into eating it toward the end....

Now, this next part will only make sense if you know that after folkbabies, I spent long weeks and months rehabbing, doing pretty severe workouts, physical therapy really. And every day when I came home cold and sore and needing to be held, to be alone in this big empty house, Akula would come curl up under my left elbow and settle in for a long chair nap with me. She'd ooze across my chest and stomach as she slept, and purr like Magic Fingers in a bed.


Well, a couple of weeks ago the hard decision came my way. As I contemplated the necessary action, holding her that last day, and then one more last day, I discovered that all my past griefs, none of them fully cried out at the time, had gotten hung onto this small cat. I just can't even say how hard it was. But we put her down much soomer than I had thought would be necessary, about a week ago.


Coming home to a house suddenly absent the catness of cat-- now, that is a hard thing. It's hard to cry about it, even, when the cat who has been your secret security blanket isn't there to comffort you, being herself the thing you are grieving.

I could hardly stand to sit in my chair. How was I going to get through a day without soft fur under my fingers? I was appalled to reliaze how important she had become; I was frightened to realize how vulnerable was my heart. Cuz I am tough.

Well. The NEXT DAY as we were leaving our Saturday Night service, young Vicky came into the building looking very troubled. She and her man have come to the service a few times, living as they do across the street from the church. We know her man from him living next door to our house with his wife Kathy for awhile in the last few years. But now he's with Vicky and their baby. Vicky was there to ask help-- I had offered to babysit if needed. Now she needed to take her man off to the hospital for his seizures, they had changed his medicine, he was having multiple seizures and could we take the baby? Yes!!!!!

Baby Alicia came home with us for a surprise overnighter. She slept mostly. She's about 2 months I guess. And when she woke up after hours on my shoulder that first night, I saw with a shock that behind those eyes was someone a little.... different.... from most of us. She's very sweet... and I think she is going to have some special needs, maybe profound ones. By the time we went to bed we'd discovered that one of the few things that gets through to her is high-pitched sound. We dutifully made Three Stooges sounds for her and she smiled and smiled back. WE won't be surprised if she will want to marry Curly when she gets a little older.

It occurred to me, that first day with Alicia, that if I had not stopped caring for Akula around the clock just the day before, we would not be able to squeeze this child into the bizarre routine that rules our house. If we had said no the first time, these very-isolated people wold not have asked again, much less have asked for us to take her very week. And here was, filling that spot Akula had filled so well. Huh, think of that, I thought.

Now she's back for another overnighter, and we will have her a few hours every Tuesday evening as well so mommy and daddy can go to GED class. I've just handed her over to Hardiman, who has just come back from a youth group meeting.

But what sent me to the computer with her on my shoulder a bit ago was the thought I'd had while we were sitting in the big recliner. I was thinking about Akula again, and there was a blues concert running on the computer with video and great sound, and as I watched and missed my kitty (oops, DAVE's kitty) I was thumping her back and butt in a sort of unconsiously-washboarding kinda way. And I realized how much I can give this child with music. Whatever capacity she has, we can help her organize it and stow a lot of good tunes down cellar. She will, at the very least, be a great dancer, because I don't think I can keep from thumping her when I listen to music, and I have a lot of music to listen to, that for some reason, I've been recording from online radio shows for weeks like a compulsive nut. And that's just the gospel material-- I also found good links to lots of good audio and video music online. And I WILL not make her a TV baby! She's a folkbaby!

And I can sing to her with my own high voice. Right now Jean Ritchie is doing it for me.


Well, that's the new folkbaby in our house. We joke that instead of having a baby of our own together when we blended our familes, we have us a Serial Baby instead. Right now we have this one. I reckon there will be a couple-few more. Word is bound to get around.

~Susan