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Amber waves

Amber waves

At New Year’s, everybody talks about resolutions.

I am learning that to love is to live without resolution.

Brave, beautiful Amber as she began her recovery

You are reading these words on the hinge of 2025. Not a soul among us can see through that door.

Bold people claim it is a screen. They inhale the future’s fragrance and exhale expectations. They will claim their fame in 2025. They will start “lifting,” whatever that means. They will stop eating Oreos by the sleeve. They will stop wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

We will just keep saving cats, which means giving up any tidy plans.

If we had a thing for “tidy,” we would never have met Amber. I am not talking about her incontinence, although there is that. I am speaking of her story. Your eighth-grade English teacher would return Amber’s story without grading it: “Incomplete. Needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Love does not have such luxuries.

Amber arrived without footnotes. There was a time before she was born, and then she came forth, a mewling teaspoon of marmalade. There was a time of innocence, and then a century of pain in one moment. The car was too fast, and the kitten too small. The storybook slammed shut before Amber was even old enough to dream.

This should not be. A kitten is kindness that fits in a human hand. A kitten is the one character you can root for even if everyone else is an orc. In the worst year of your life, a kitten reminds you that life is worth fighting for.

A kitten should be spared “trauma to the head and spine.” A kitten should be immune to the wheels of pain. We tremble and demand some comforting resolution.

All we get is the cry of one kitten, and a thousand questions we don’t have time to answer.

So all we do is love.

Being a kitten, Amber had no expectation of an explanation. She did not read the grim prognosis or reap its doom. She saw herself in the stainless-steel emergency room cage, realized she was the happiest color, and proceeded accordingly. She befriended surgeons and survival itself. Nurses and specialists spoke in hushed tones of this “little fighter.”

But Amber’s survival did not look like a battle plan or a resolution. It looked like the liturgy of love. Amber is here because Amber is infatuated with being alive. You might even say that Amber loves years, all of them.

Even 2024.

Twelve months ago, 2024 kept its secrets. It knew we would meet Unicorn and lose Unicorn. It knew we would go on an odyssey involving one hundred thirty-plus cats. It knew I still would be unable to type Durin’s name in December without tears fogging my lenses. It knew Carrot would be adopted after nine years, each of which knew it wasn’t their time. It knew a kitten sweeter than grade-A maple syrup would suffer catastrophic injuries. It knew she would survive to frolic like a flapjack into the next secret, sacred, unresolved year.

In greedy moments, we think we want to know what next year knows. Who will recover, and who will be adopted? Can we have coming attractions of the strangers who will become our best friends? May we at least dream their faces? What will love ask of us?

It is all so unknown, so unresolved.

We could avoid it, if we picket-fenced our love.

Just days before her adoption. New beginnings happen all year…

But this is Tabby’s Place, where every heart is free range. To love is to live without resolution. It is the only life worth calling “beautiful.”

To love is to look into Amber’s eyes, an orange-hazel usually reserved for sunrises. One will always tilt off to the side, as though she glimpses something greater than any plan. She knows enough to love the year already. Between feats of leaping like an anti-gravity bean, she tells us what she knows.

Yes. The year will give more than it asks. Yes. We will have everything we need for all the joy and grief to come. Yes. They will both be vast. Yes. We will be equipped when the time comes, but not a moment before. No. We cannot pre-order strength or wonderment.

The door is about to open, and 2025 will be here. It is scary out there, but Amber will be looking after us, so we will be brave.

There is good company here, curled up on the dot of every question mark. We can’t know which lights will be red and which will be green, but they will all be orange. Perhaps even Amber.

PS: Wave your tail if you are surprised to hear that Amber was adopted. Hmm, no tails waving. OK, dance with wild abandon if you are unsurprised but elated to hear that Amber was adopted with Stromboli (pictured at left). That’s more like it.

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