Under our sky, “standards” sometimes melt.
Blizzards barge into springtime. Lions crash through the suburbs in broad daylight.
Hope and grief clasp the same candle.
Between the pages of winter, Snowy lost her place.
When love is your home, you don’t need a suitcase. Snowy’s peace was “travel bug” repellent. Can Paris compete with tenderness? What does Santa Fe have over a soulmate’s lap? Can the Riviera offer anything but a pale echo of home’s gold?
Isn’t this the dream destination: a life too sweet to leave?
But sometimes the story packs your bags, snuffs the candles, and sends you on a far journey. The marshmallow cat was torched by tragedy.
It all happened so fast. Love was all, love was here, love was gone.
Were it in her power, Snowy’s soulmate would have stayed forever. But death throws light years between beloveds, and the little cat was lost in her own home.
The sky scowled. Lions roared. Candles failed.
But mercy was bridging the dark distance.
Somewhere beyond our sight, Snowy’s soulmate loved her still. Through a series of circumstances that no astronomer could explain, Snowy and her siblings — Ash, Shiloh, and Fiona — fell from the frozen sky and landed on a planet humid with hope.
Which is to say, Tabby’s Place.
Snowy couldn’t have known that her life, like her courage, like the universe itself, was expanding. When your heart is bitten by the cruelest frost, everything just feels distant.
We saw it in Snowy’s eyes, lacy with icy sorrow. While Ash was anxious and Fiona was cautious and Shiloh was as silly as a goat with a pinwheel, Snowy was a stranger to herself.
Love was the standard, and love had left. Safety was the story, and the pages had all burned.
Home was the measure of mercy, but despair rolled for miles in all directions.
We struggled to string new stars into Snowy’s sky. When she couldn’t bear the long walk to hope, we carried her on the strong shoulders of solidarity. With someone quiet by her side, she would lick her broth, look in our eyes, look for her place in this wintry world.
When her body rebelled and suspicious masses amassed, we spoke through surgery and soft kisses. With tender treatment, she would heal in more ways than one.
When she froze at our touch, we wielded warmth with no expectation.
Accepted in the dark, Snowy risked the light. Sorrow-scorched, she lined up tiny marshmallows before us. I will let you accompany me. I float weightless, homeless, but I will waft beside you. I will let you touch me. I will look…at…you. Yes, I will look at you, even though I am afraid.
When a cat glimpses her courage, all four winds still to a whisper. All the ages and eons lean in close, and the sky softens to sherpa.
The stars shushed each other as Snowy looked in our eyes. White flame, hot sorrow, she stared all the way back, back through the optic nervousness, back through the winters, back through the dangers, back through the travels that no snow-child chooses.
I cannot tell you what Snowy saw, only that she found herself when she saw herself found again.
In the impossible astronomy of love, the distance of death does not mean the death of tomorrow.
In the terrifying grace of life under our sky, there is love after love.
In the mercy of a warm winter, snowdrops stand like standard candles.
Like Snowy the bereaved, Snowy the beautiful, Snowy the beloved, a “standard candle” is a supernova of great importance.
Not yet available in French Vanilla or Spring Meadow scents, standard candles are celestial objects of known brightness. Astronomers use them to calculate physical distance across boggling distances.
Like Snowy the brilliant, Snowy the brave, Snowy the beacon, we are all trying to grapple with boggling distances.
We are chasing light across darkness.
We are longing for the love that will end all our travels.
Under our sky, we are all small and snowbound, pilgrims and refugees who don’t get to control the itinerary.
But over and again, when we look into each other’s eyes, mercy bridges the distance.
Snowy is coming home.
We are holding her broth-dish and holding her candle, even when our own flickers.
We are healing in more ways than one.
We are finding each other and being found.
PS: Those nasty masses? Benign. Rejoice and reign, Queen Snowy.