morethanenoughtruth

While my twenty-six baby chicks are peaceably assembled in the bathroom, my sweet Collie-dog Maggie is coming unglued.  She harbors a deep-felt certainty that she is meant to nursemaid any and all infant creatures.  She had mothered my cat Espresso, for example, to the extent that he thought he was a dog.

That cat was an essay in perversion.  It’s not all my fault.  I had help raising him.  It was Maggie who had nursed and nurtured him in everything maternal but milk.  Maggie and I share a tendency toward bountiful hair.  She, born and coated to romp the icy plain of Prince Edward Island, rolling in the many names of snow that define that bleak coastal expanse, and I, who thanks to some wooly gene, grow hair fast as a naughty weed, are both hirsute critters.  She and her siblings brought life to that frozen Canadian shore as sure as she brought it to me, a good bit farther south.

When she arrived in her air transport crate at the relatively tropical latitude of Roanoke, Virginia, her undercoat was so thick it couldn’t be parted to reveal skin.  She looked like the promise of some arctic sled puppy waiting to grow into her harness and take off for Nome.  Soon the intelligence of her physiology arranged a molt, and she dropped an amazing excess of that glorious load.  Even in the most challenging of Roanoke Valley winters, she never regained her puppy coat grandeur.  But it was more than enough to satisfy the psychic longings of the five week old rescue kitten I acquired one spring, having spent a long dark winter needing someone, something, some-living-anything soft and cuddly to love.

I named him Espresso after his rich black glossy full-bodied coat and his whole-bodied, whole-psyche willingness to give himself up to his yearnings.  Maggie sniffed and goosed his little round exit sphincter with her cold intelligent nose and straightaway recognized a baby in need of mothering, while Espresso, recognizing a good thing when he found it, dug in and began a long frustrating search for milk and Mom.  Finding instead a delicious warmth amid a lush jungle of dog hair, he accepted a warm full belly, compliments of a standard cat bowl, and settled for the care of a Collie-dog nanny.

Of course with all that canine mothering he thought he was a dog.  He went for walks with the family, the two humans, the Collie and the Bichon Frizé.  We presented a strange assortment of Animalia to the natural fauna of the Roanoke valley countryside.  Maggie, ever mother, stood patiently while Espresso wound in and out about her legs, spinning a happy abstraction of good will.

In the course of things, Maggie goes away, her absence mourned by cat and human alike.  Espresso and I, truly an odd couple, grow ever closer, making of an old friendship a newly awakened need, a raging mutual desire for comfort and solace.  Dog gone, now it is the cat that usurps that “doggone” cold place in the bed, making of it a warm island of happiness, small but mighty.

Snuggling the feline body against the frozen isolation of cold winter nights, clever mechanical thermostat adjusted down to stretch resources in favor of eggs and peanut butter, milk and bread, gasoline and medicine, a new feeling makes a Sandburg entrance on little cat feet.  A living creature pressed against tautness of breast and body speaks to givingness as need.  Memory of milk, long dry, lets down as virtual hormonal angst, wanting—wanting to be given.  Glands activate.  Oxytocin pours into streams of coursing blood.  Brain tastes and translates primal need.  Memory wakens, recalling nights of hard young bodies twined in silent satisfaction, floating islands of fulfillment on an ocean of animal intent.  Now I know why spinsters and old ladies keep cats.

All this is unremarkable until Espresso equates my thick messy head of hair with his kitten memories of Maggie.  He buries his happy nose into the graying blonde tangle and kneads bread lustily while his thoughts drift back to being a babe at Maggie’s hairy teat.  He becomes relentless in his expression of adoration and need.  It demonstrates how strange and wonderful is this world of living loving creatures.  My cat is most assuredly a pervert, but he loves me.  What can I say?

Back to the bathroom door—from Maggie’s perspective, anything little and sweet is a love-object.  She self-identifies as its guardian.  Hearing little cheeps, she stands at the bathroom door and fairly shakes, her teeth rattling with the vibratory energy of her drive to mother.  When she sees me coming she begins to prance demonstrating the urgency of her need.

Of course I can’t let her in.  How would that play?  When she tumbles to what the little cheepers actually are, she would surely break into being a real dog and initiate a catch and kill scenario.  That would be ugly.

But she proves me wrong.  One day the door not fully secured, she slips in and makes her own inspection of the nursery.  A heat lamp hangs suspended from the ceiling, the chicks crowded beneath its golden rays.  Yesterday’s newsprint lines the floor with chicks applying their own abstract expressionism to its pages.  Maggie sniffs the babies, tastes their head fluff, twitches her nose and shake-rattles her head.  Yes, these are babies.  Well, all right then.  She settles onto the paper, curls about the little flock, and waits.

By the time I discover them, the chicks have written off the lamp and are gathered in aggregate about Maggie’s hairy belly.  Each chick has found a spot to inhabit and has nestled into it with a surety and gratitude for a love so freely given.  Nobody is fighting for a warm teat, but everybody is happily at home.  Maggie, too, has drifted off to a heavenly peace.