Cat odor as a harbinger of health
Non-smoking, please.
I was so excited for school to end last year. Summer felt like freedom. We could all sleep in; no more car pool lane, no more moldy lunch boxes, no more "I have a giant project due tomorrow" at 10pm bombs.
And we've had a good summer. My older boys wanted to go camping with us for the first time in several years, and together (what a car load with all five of us!) we explored Central Idaho's Dark Sky Reserve, camping several times along highway 75 and cooling off by jet-skiing & paddle boarding in various mountain lakes.
I'm writing this from our traditional last hurrah before school starts again at Lava Hot Springs; specifically in the one corner of the condo where the (slow) wifi works.
But I have been weirdly depressed since June. Despite the heavy widow stuff and the stress crippling panic of figuring out how to support us all on my own, this was different. It wasn't the many-times-underlined "situational depression" in my medical chart. It was the kind of depression that you just wake up with one day. The kind that descends from the sky like a heavy shroud; that clings to you and makes you feel like you're dragging a lead cape around everywhere you go. You can't shake it off. You can't exercise, kale smoothie, or Vitamin D it off. You can't even really medicate it off (though I'm trying). It just hangs out, like an unwelcome house guest that eats too much and sheds so much hair all your drains end up clogged.
It is getting a little better; thus the surprising energy to newsletter (hi, everyone), and I am growing hopeful the return to more of a schedule when school starts will help even more. For me, that's such a weird thing to hope for. I hate schedules. I hate the alarm going off when it's still dark outside. But as I do not know what else to hope for, it is all I've got.
I woke up at 5am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. So of course I laid there thinking about dumb things I said twenty plus years ago that I wish I hadn't. Because, why not?
Growing up, my friend across the culdesac was from one of the few non-Mormon families in our neighborhood. Her parents smoked and would periodically try to quit. Whenever they did, I could tell because I could more easily smell their many cats.
Now, I loved my friend, I loved her parents, and I loved those cats. But I was also a little weirdo running around with undiagnosed ADHD and had NO idea that announcing cheerfully that I knew they'd stopped smoking because I could smell their cats would be in any way shape or form, rude.
In my somewhat weak defense, I was, after all, a child of the 70s/80s. I remember smoking sections in restaurants and needing to request non-smoking rooms at hotels. After a battery of "nicotine will kill you dead" assemblies at school (complete with posters of blackened, tar-filled lungs plastered up and down the halls), a friend regularly shouted, "Put out your cancer stick!" as we cycled past people smoking at bus stops on our banana-seat bikes.
So you see, we were all a little socially unaware---no one bothered to teach us about the delicate nuances of addiction or ensured we practiced empathy for our fellow humans. Cigarettes were definitively bad because they were going to kill my friend's parents. What was a little cat odor next to that? Smelling litter boxes and musty cans of cat food were morally neutral realities that were, in my mind, cause for celebration. Huzzah! Confetti!
I was a fully grown adult with babies and children and gray hair before I realized how awful and insane my cheerful declarations of, "Congratulations! I can smell your kittehs!" must have sounded and now the knowledge of that extremely tardy awareness wakes me up sometimes and sits on my chest for a while.
Both of my friend's parents died not too long ago. Her mom from complications COPD, her dad from leukemia. They were wonderful people and I'm so glad I got to know them. I wish I could write and thank them for their many years of kindness (they moved into the neighborhood when their younger daughter and I were just three years old) and apologize for being an insensitive dolt. But they'd probably just laugh and tell me they knew long before I did that my brain worked a little differently.
Anyway, we're headed home to our own litter box both figuratively and literally. It's a depression joke and some self-depreciating mockery! I jest! I am hilar! The kitten I surprised my daughter with last year is now a year old. She thoroughly despises Molly, our German Shepherd who, with her entire heart and soul, longs to be best friends forever with this mysterious new creature that only ever arches her back and hisses. It's fun! I really enjoy trying to train and raise pets that my dead husband could have animal-whispered into sweet, sweet peace and compliance in mere minutes.
With that bit of masterful literature, I'll leave you. A note for my premium subscribers: I know. I have left you hanging. I have seven drafts, all unwieldy and overlong. The next installment is coming soon.
xo everyone. Thanks for being here.