Today, confetti on our noses, everything is new.
We are bubbling champagne kittens. We are unfettered by the past.
We want to believe this is true.
But the truth is even better than the new.
The truth is, the ornery old year is joining us for the new one. This means certain bad things follow us from 2023: war, The Golden Bachelor, decaf.
The mercy is, we are all made of stories, and we get to introduce old to new.
We get to keep 2023’s treasures and show them off to 2024.
Hey, Baby New Year: check out the day Derby was adopted against all odds, even though he is exquisitely odd, precisely because he is regally odd.
January, feast your eyes on the hour we realized Mara was going to make it, clog-dancing on death’s scaly head, turning grief to gold, practicing resurrection.
Tubby little 2024, you newborn nugget, learn the ways of the proud day when Quinn’s Corner came true, beginning the new era of FeLV+ flourishing, as well as Oram‘s Funky Fest, a raucous rejoicing with no end in sight.
Brand-new, grand-new, scary-new, sit at the knee of the old, and be bold.
Yes, a year is a fearsome thing, sure to wound us in ways it’s best we don’t yet know. If you told us, in January 2023, how much we would lose, how much heaven would gain, in February, we’d have curled in fetal position until the cats wrote to Congress requesting a State of Emergency declaration. (The National Guard can be activated to administer squeeze-poultry in situations of grave extremity.)
There are things 2024 knows that we don’t.
But a year at Tabby’s Place, even if spattered with grief, is a page in a fervent love story. The cats’ story. Our story.
And that means that our dream is not in vain. Everything is, in fact, new. Even “old.”
Even Juel.
If vegan cheese and weak WiFi need to sneak into 2024 behind us, it’s a good thing Juel’s coming, too. For although Juel is older than Willie Nelson and twice as high, he is exactly the storyteller that babies like the New Year and you and I need.
Juel has lived through enough years to know that there is always something to be grateful for and something to be outraged about. Juel just happens to be outrageous enough to focus on the former.
Perhaps there was a time when Juel complained. His life has been a tangled yarn, with ups and downs jostling to grab the pen. But neither age nor “inappropriate elimination” nor the unconscionable absence of Hot Pockets in Suite E is the lead narrator of Juel’s years.
Juel is the narrator.
Juel is the story itself.
And Juel is quite content to call it all a fairy tale, with the requisite dragons and foggy forests. Juel knows how this ends, because Juel knows how the story of each day ends: warm and fed, loved by lunatics and let in on the secret that love is the key that unlocks all the years.
Juel keeps his doors and his heart open.
Everything old is new again, and everything love is true in the end.
Happy New Year, kittens.