The whole year has led to today.
It’s here, dear ones: the Linda Fund Matching Challenge.
This is the cats’ moment.
This is your moment.
This was almost not Dahlia‘s moment.
There was a time when Dahlia could dilly-dally over her moments.
When you are young and strong, and the honeysuckle breeze tickles your whiskers, you can take good days for granted. Hours grow like tomatoes on the vine, all plump and plentiful.
But a cat with no roots has no promise that peace will last.
The little stray’s dreamy summer shriveled into a hungry fall. Dahlia had never faced a winter like this. Between ice storms and blinding blizzards, every moment felt like a marathon.
By the time she staggered into spring, Dahlia was three and a half pounds.
If you were to glance in Dahlia’s direction, you might think the little tabby was a heap of dead leaves, dry and depleted. Ribs bulging, her once-plush stripes resembled bare branches. She was the epitome of “invisible,” at just the moment she needed to be seen.
But you, Tabby’s Place family, are not the people of the glance.
You are the people of the gaze.
You are the people who look long enough to love.
You are the people of the moment.
If you have ever given to the Linda Fund, you were the strength in Dahlia’s trembling legs.
By some mystery of mercy, she knew that people like you were out there, somewhere. Woozy with anemia and starvation, she made her last, bravest stand. One weary paw after another, she dragged herself onto soft soil … a flower farm.
Dahlia turned her fading eyes to the first sun she’d seen in as long as she could remember: the face of the flower farmer.
What would he see in this wizened wildflower?
Was she an uninvited scavenger, a hungry nuisance? Even if she had once been lovely, was she now a lost cause, past the point of saving?
Flowers fade. Moments pass. Surely, compassion has its limits?
Everything depended upon what kind of person the desperate Dahlia had found.
There are “most people.”
And then there are the people of the moment.
Tabby’s Place people.
It turns out the flower farmer was a lot like you.
With a barn full of bulbs, the “dahlia man” knew about the hope that sleeps inside small things. A dry husk, small enough to hide in his hand, would burst back to life as a fat magenta dahlia, or a pink peony as fluffy as a feather boa.
What looks lost may only need time and tending.
Love perseveres like a perennial.
The dahlia man hurried his weak friend into his barn, warm among the wintering flowers. But as Dahlia gobbled plate after plate of food, purring her thanks with all her ebbing strength, he knew: she was running out of time. Second and third helpings would not be enough.
It was a Linda Fund moment.
The Linda Fund is Tabby’s Place’s reserve for cats in absolute crisis.
This stockpile of mercy provides every frantic drive to the emergency vet, every hour of intensive care, every delicate surgery, and every gathering of world-class specialists on a cat’s behalf.
The Linda Fund is life for the dying, love immune to “impossible,” and the way when there is no way.
You might say the Linda Fund is the barn full of flower bulbs at Tabby’s Place. Like peonies and dahlias awaiting their time, your donation stands ready for the moment a Dahlia arrives.
When the dahlia man called, there was no time to fundraise, only to answer.
“Yes” meant life. “No” meant…
…let us not waste our precious moments on thinking about what “no” might have meant.
For, thanks to you, we were ready. You burst into bloom across space and time.
You raced Dahlia to a cutting edge hospital, where the next days would be critical. Through blood transfusions, delicate re-feeding, and the sovereign stubbornness of love, you saved Dahlia.
The never-before-cuddled cat craved what she had only glimpsed in dreams. And today, not so many moments after everything nearly ended, Dahlia thrives in love’s wide gaze.
But the next Dahlia is still searching the sky for your kind face.
We do not know what she has suffered.
We can’t predict what she will need from us.
We can only promise we will be here. And we can keep that promise if you give to the Linda Fund.
If you have ever let love lead you, this is your moment, Tabby’s Place family. Now through 9/30, your Linda Fund gift will be doubled.
This is our most critical fundraiser of the entire year. We will draw upon this “barn” for every desperate cat who arrives over the coming fall, winter, spring, and summer.
We must replenish the Linda Fund now, so we can say “yes” when the rest of the world says “no.”
This is your moment, Tabby’s Place family.
The trouble with moments is that they pass. We need to reach the Linda Fund goal by 9/30.
So please rise up like the dahlia man, like Dahlia, and like love itself.
The Linda Fund has begun, so beginnings can break through endings like stubborn dandelions through the sidewalk.
Let us be the people Dahlia always believed would come.
Let us be the people of the moment.