There is a big difference between allowed and personally okay in respect to just about anything. No matter how prepared a person, place, staff, and customers might be for our reawakening…coming out, dining out, being closer together…the reality once put into practice can be quite different.
Our dearest Angela often reminds us that we need to be gentle with ourselves and each other. She has never been more right than at this moment, on this cusp.
As I write this, I am trying to be gentle with myself. We just returned from dining outside at a wonderful cafe, from which we have happily and cautiously brought home delicious pastries on several occasions in the last couple of months. Everyone was careful of spacing, masking, cleaning, everything.
They could not have done it more right.
I couldn’t get home fast enough.
This experience has made me more appreciative than ever of the great care that is being taken with our Tabby’s Place reopening. Karina is showing the greatest care for us volunteers, the marvelous staff, and our beloved kitties as she works to implement new plans to allow at least some of us stroller and solaria visits. Denise writes to us of the health and well being of our furry friends. Danielle, Rebecca, Jessica, and Drew (and many others!) give us peeks inside daily operations and interactions and some downright silliness that has been going on, while the rest of us look on through social media from the safety of our homes.
We have been treated with the greatest kindness and gentleness that anyone can hope for. Our whole Tabby’s Place community has done the same, each for one another as we share posts, blogs, pictures, and love for every single toe bean, booper (nose, in case you didn’t know), and tail that sashays around our most precious sanctuary.
Sanctuary. Safe haven. Protective shelter. Home.
Just thinking about all of the goodness of Tabby’s Place has finally made me feel a lot less tweaked and much more able to look forward, as always, to seeing everyone and all the kitties again…through some fencing or windows, and carefully, respectfully, while safely veiled (Angela got that 100% right too).
Editor’s note: Dangit Kitty, you had to go and make me cry. Thank you (seriously). And if youze guyze are wondering what these photos are about and why they are relevant to Kitty’s gorgeous words, (a) they are our Star Wars kittens, Luke, Han, Chewy and Leia, and (b) they would have you know that they are always relevant. But then, I have a feeling you already grokked that. XO, AH