Good news in tough times

The Good, The Bad, The Sad, and the Ugly…
This week is the last week of the class I teach at National, the week with the most intensive work, and my elderly blonde cat (a little over fifteen) has stopped being able to eat well though the vet couldn’t find any reason. We’ve been feeding her tiny amounts of chicken, which she seems to be able to keep down, and give her plenty of petting, brushing, all the stuff she loves, so in case these are her last days, they’ll be as pleasant as possible. But it makes it hard to focus to anything else. Urgh. You’d think with me growing up on a farm – my first experience with death was finding my beloved gray kitten half-eaten by a local dog when I was about five – would make me better about dealing with animal mortality. But no.
Along with that, my injured ankle – the same foot that I broke a bunch of bones in two years ago – seems to not want to heal – the tendon keeps healing and then re-inflaming with the slightest provocation. It’s frustrating being on and off crutches and a cane months after the original injury.
So, I was feeling a bit down, a little cranky/overwhelmed, and then I received word about a poetry acceptance that is pretty exciting for me – at a magazine I’m going to be really proud of being a part of. (I’ll reveal the deets after I get the contract.) And my publisher is sending me ARCs in the mail, and just sent me a cute little box of bookmarks – aren’t they sweet? I was thinking about the fact that I received word about my Dorothy Prize a few years back the day I got out of the hospital for a horrible respiratory infection and my landlord at the rental house we were in at the time had neglected to pay his propane bill for so long that they repossessed it so we had no hot water or heat in the house.
So what does this all mean? It seems there is never good news without a little balancing badness, and yet, we are never allowed to be utterly miserable because then, that moment when you’re ready to throw in the towel, is when someone will call with the news of some unexpected blessing.
So I’ll go back to taking care of my sick cat and injured ankle with a slightly lighter heart. (I’d give you a reading report on Billy Collins recent SAL Seattle reading, but you know, it was a regular Billy reading, though he seemed a little more tired, with a bit less of a twinkle, than the last time I’d seen him in California. Maybe it was that party at the White House with Aimee Mann and Common.)