we got a kitten and i am writing an essay

About a week ago, my husband and I turned eighteen. Eighteen as a couple, that is. Eighteen years since our first date, where we went to Z Harvest Cafe in Green Bay, walked along the riverfront, watched VHS of Othello in our friends' apartment in Milwaukee. On our one-year anniversary, my then-boyfriend gave me an orange tabby cat whom I loved the stuffing out of. He was a one-woman cat, that Libby, and he snarled and batted away anyone who tried to say otherwise. Libby was the best reading cat on the planet, and I fell apart when he and his friend Gatsby, our second cat, became old and passed away. I have to use the euphemism because my heart feels like a wobbly top thinking about it--I can't say died because I feel so complicit and as a caretaker of any animal, we wonder what could we have done differently, how could we have saved them. I was minus two cats for a while and vowed no more, because our carpets and our sanity needed it, but in those cat-free years, I realized, begrudgingly, that I was a cat person, if nothing else than to have a soft wedge of fur, a little weight leaned up against me as I read late at night.

Eventually and somehow, my beloved husband gave in, and here she is: Scout, whom you may also call Miss Jean Louise Finch if you forget Scout (this, I told my four-year-old son who just calls her "Kitty" for now, though he's managed "Mastinca"--my classroom angora rabbit--with grace, which means he'll get there). This little pip seems like, if she were human, she'd be content to hop into a pair of overalls and climb oak trees and hide in the balcony of her father's trial, if these opportunities presented themselves.

For now, she's our little scattershot cat, sweet on me, but also on all the members of our household, and every time I see her little face, I light up, so I know bringing her into this house, which is already too-full with fur and scales and feathers, was the right thing.

We in training are facing a week off, while our trainer goes to Prague for a big muckety-muck Montessori conference, and I am doing my Sunday duty, which is to dance around the work of my album until I finally take the plunge and just get through the darn thing, and I'm looking forward to some time here at home, bonding with the cats and my children, one of whom lost her first tooth last night and I'm trying not to collapse from the sheer speed at which they are aging, and I also started my first bona fide essay that may or may not get submitted once I finish the polish on it about Montessori and training and becoming a teacher again. Maybe it won't be an essay that will live in the world, but I know that writing, be it poems or prose or some kind of hybrid monster in between, is my way of thinking through complex things, and when I've managed my way to the other side, I've made some kind of peace. I have some big, complicated questions in my head, and if I can bully them into some structure (that really is bullying me, let's be honest here--), then I can make sense of it, some of it, maybe even all.

For now, I read. And I'm reading too much at the same time, but I want to recommend one book in particular: 100 Essays I Don't Have to Write, which is smart, thoughtful, brief, compact, companionable, something I want to both devour and take sips at, and I admire that capability in an essay, in an essayist. It's enough to drive me back to the page and essay--to try--on my own.