Awaiting custody

Since Covid-19 took control, I've been ordering my groceries on-line, and picking them up at Safeway each Tuesday.

When I picked my groceries up today, the grocery boy hoisted something new -- and heavy -- into my trunk.

A large box of kitty litter. 

My two kittens will be six weeks old on Thursday.  Along with a third brother, they are still being cared for by their mother in Winthrop -- a town in Okanogan county, 187 miles (by road) northeast of Seattle.  They and their natural mother are in foster care with a very friendly and caring foster mother (human), who regularly texts me photos of the kittens' amazingly fast growth.  She has given them provisional names of Gustaf and Wallaby -- named after, allegedly, two foreign brands of licorice.  I'll quickly rename them after assessing their personalities.

I'll pick them up in another two or three weeks, after they're weaned from an increasingly impatient parent, and after they've received their various shots and have been neutered by a local veterinarian. 

The purchase of kitty litter is my promise to the kittens that I'm eagerly awaiting their arrival. 

Pets are in short supply during the epidemic.  People are lonely, and are looking for dogs and cats to keep them company.  That's true of me, as well, but after owning -- or being owned by -- five previous cats from kittenhood to death, something more than loneliness must be at work.

Although I've always considered The Owl to be my spirit animal, I suspect that, insofar as pets go,  I'm undoubtedly a Cat Person.  I'm not sure how I feel about that -- images of a smelly house, of furniture covered with cat fur, and of myself reading on a dark winter evening with cats twined about my body..

But, as our President would say, "It is what it is."