Things That Do Not Exist, an incomplete list: Coincidences; hopeless cats; legitimate uses of fat-free mayonnaise.
If you are unsure about that first item, just ask a few cats.
Preferably the “hopeless” ones.
There have been over 4,700 roads to Tabby’s Place, as unique as the paw prints that have walked them.
There is also only one road to Tabby’s Place, and it is Serendipity Street.
Just think of September.
Forty-nine exhausted, emaciated animals hobbled out of a hoarding situation. Tabby’s Place was one of several organizations who came to their aid.
But the eleven cats who became Tabby’s Place cats burned with fevers and sorrows we were born to heal. Was it a coincidence that these eleven became our eleven? They purr at the pulse of meant-to-be.
Then, a kitten lighter than a silk scarf blew away from her nest, wafting wounded and alone. A Tabby’s Place person “happened” to find her. Love “happened” to be in time to battle an encroaching infection.
The tiny tabby “happens” to be named Angelica, as the whole heavenly host supervises her recovery.
The Linda Fund Matching Challenge launched before we’d ever looked in Marigold‘s hazel eyes. You gave your all for cats unseen. You loved them in advance. You made an end run around death itself, heading it off at the pass. And when the cinnamon kitten with pneumonia arrived at the emergency vet, you were there, not one hour too soon.
You could not have known that your gift could save her.
Here you are.
Here we all are, together, on the shortest road between fear and love. It’s no coincidence. It’s compassion. And if this brokenhearted world is ever going to recover from its amnesia about hope, it’s going to need the cats, and us.
We should tell it what happened in September at Tabby’s Place:
Arrived: Maple, Syrup, Flap, Jacks, Waffle, and Crepe (inside mama Pancake); Ricky, Twix (pictured in top thumbnail), Odessa, Spain, Obi, Peeka, Magpie, Macaw, Anne, Acadia, Daisy, Sadie, Salem, Pixie, Polka, Teddy, Toby, Riley, Mysterio, Drew
Adopted: Sunny & Schwartz (together); Mew & Littles (together); Sweetums; Maggie Mae; Doody; Phineas; Kenickie; Cobalt (pictured in top thumbnail); Midge; Hydrogen; Zuko; Cinereous; Nemea
Promoted to Heaven: Goodwin
Stuff We Learned: When the word “hopeless” hisses at a cat, the Tabby’s Place family roars back. You carried our cats to the most successful, life-saving, glorious Linda Fund in history.
Add this to the list of Things That Don’t Exist: “ways to thank you enough.”
A fifty-ship flotilla would not suffice. A cheesecake the size of a trampoline would be inadequate. Not even a personal visit from all one hundred fifty Tabby’s Place cats, driven in a chartreuse double-decker bus by Chef Boyardee, could do the job.
Your generosity will soon save strangers we have never seen. They will become the friends we can’t remember living without. Take it from Willie, Farley, Corduroy, and Marigold: your light is more powerful than you know. Your love runs laps around this exhausted Earth, in ways you can’t imagine. It is no coincidence. It is all grace.
Oh, and one last thing.
Today is Tabby’s Place’s 22nd anniversary.
That’s 22 years of carrying Tabby‘s candle into dark places.
22 years of saving cats from hopeless situations.
22 years of remembering who really gets saved in that equation.
Will you be with us for the next 22?
Excellent. Just hold the “coincidences” and the fat-free mayo. We don’t need those around here.
opportunity for donations to be matched, up to $22,000.
