What is this all about?
We are in the season of moonshadows and miracles.
I do not mean summer.
We do this every year; we do this by love’s decree; we do this, like everything, for the cats in deepest darkness.
“This” is the Linda Fund Matching Challenge. You may know it well. You may know it not. You may not realize that the Linda Fund is in its thirteenth year.
None of us realizes the full light of what we’re up to here.
Summer by summer, I have the task of tapping out text for the button on our home page: “What’s this about?” This is meant to quickly summarize the Linda Fund for first-time visitors.
A more efficient Development Director would just cut and paste from the year before — the Linda Fund remains the Linda Fund, after all.
But I am the dunderhead who keeps trying to get it right, do it justice, capture the comet by the tail and use it as a fountain pen.
What is this all about? This is about Prescott, the cat with the word “precious” attached to her name like a heart-shaped sticker. She is the silver princess who rejects self-pity while accepting every living creature.
She is the light of our Lobby, a life force so intense, “sadness” warns “outrage” and “indignation” that this is not a favorable atmosphere for their survival.
Prescott is every impossibility you were too scared to pray for, the truth too good to write down. She is lithe forgiveness on four legs, the moon that shines because she turns towards the Love.
She is comedy and chaos, somersaulting with Hips and vaulting over Valerie. She is impulsive affection, reckless trust, a sturdy truce with this cratered world.
She is the happiest cat in Tabby’s Place history.
She is not supposed to be lighthearted.
She is not supposed to be here at all.
Prescott was a grey pebble in the smallest state, Rhode Island’s merest meteorite. Darkness was her only companion. She was attacked in the forest, by forces we will never know, and only the stars were there to weep over her.
Shelters do not take cats like Prescott, shattered moonshadows with injuries “incompatible with life.” It is a fool’s errand, a paper airplane shooting for Saturn, to empty your pocketbook saving a lost cause. It is a flashlight in the abyss to tell a dying cat “live!”
We are fools and flashlights at Tabby’s Place. We are aliens to a world that weighs and measures and finds cats unworthy of hope against hope.
The Linda Fund is our spaceship.
What is this all about? The Linda Fund is the “yes” yelled into outer space. When hope smolders and everyone else says no, the Linda Fund is the presumptuous promise, “you are home, held, hope-ward bound. You will have everything you need to thrive. You are ours. And from today forward, we are yours. You are a Tabby’s Place cat.”
The Linda Fund is the rebellious reserve that covers costs too brash for others to bear: intensive care and emergency surgery, mending and mercy for cats we’ve just met.
The Linda Fund is the grace that can’t be earned.
What is this all about? This is about the hopeless cats who make the other “hopeless cats” look like tycoons, the last of the least of the littlest of the lost. This is about throwing all our moons and stars at a Prescott we’ve been told will not last the night.
This is about the dawn that was not supposed to come.
This is about the silver cat who answered death with life, loved through the night that was meant to be her last. This is about her eyes meeting ours, miracle meeting moonshadow, the end crashing through beginnings that keep beginning every lush Lobby morning.
This is about “your donation doubled for emergency and specialty care, our greatest and most variable expense.” This is about saving lives. This is the alchemy of your check turning into surgeries and ICU stays and fearless feats of life-saving.
That is the barest fraction of what this is about.
This is about the world we want to live in. This is about everything terrible coming untrue. This is about love’s feral “NO!” to the darkness that overplays its hand.
This is about Prescott, precious Prescott.
Six months ago, she nearly lost her life in agony. Today, we cannot imagine our own lives without her.
Who waits for us in the shadows as I type these words? What beloved friend will soon be stitched into your heart and mine, irrevocably ours?
We can’t see their faces yet. We can’t know what they will need from us, nor how they will mend our broken hearts.
We can pack love’s sandwiches for their long journey homeward, hopeward, promise-ward. We can make the Linda Fund fat with futures, obese with “impossibles” turned assurances. We can be ready for the beloveds who will change our lives if we save theirs.
What is this all about? I have scarcely begun to put it into words.
Where words fail, precious Prescott prevails. Where words limp, the moonshadow soars.
Please give to the Linda Fund today.
13 years since Linda found her way to Tabby’s Place? Wow. Every year since, I have looked for and participated in the fund named for Linda. Thanks once again, Tabby’s Place – for saving all the cats.