… to end an exhausting day, although caring for a medicatedly docile mom is a lot easier than caring for a discombobulated one. But one cataract is out and she’s sleeping. I’ve had a week of having to remember to put one eye drop in the selected eye four times a day, and yesterday and today it was three different eye drops at various times. She had the easy part.
And this is the thought, by May Sarton — from today’s Writer’s Almanac:
“My cat likes to go out at one in the morning, so I have to let him out. And at two he meows to come in. [During that time] I make notes for poems. And then in the morning, when I’m all there, as much as I ever am, I work at them. I would not still be a poet without the cat.”
She also wrote, in her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, (1965), “There were moments … when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.”
For me, there seems to be no getting to the real things, cat or not. At least not yet.