Friday Unrelated Information

1. Has anyone had any experience with “kitty window boxes“? Toby is an inside-only cat while I’m living next to Pirate House and busy streets, but he’s already expressed a very strong interest in open (screened) windows. This could work, but I ‘m afraid that he’d either figure out how to knock this out of the window and escape, or that it would drive him bonkers to be even closer to the birds but still unable to get them.2. I’m about three steps away from turning into a crazy cat lady, aren’t I?

3. To counteract yesterday’s “sad little llama picture,” as my mother called it, here’s another happy Mary Oliver poem I found:

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.