Bye bye love

Our sweet, nine-month-old kitten Moxie died, we are figuring, at the teeth of a fox. The foxes are known risks in our neighborhood, and our little cat was a housecat until very recently, when she started going out a little (an hour or two) at a time. This time she didn't come back in around bedtime. Today, three days later, a neighbor who has seen our signs calls us and tells us about seeing a scrap of tail near the tree. I go outside the house thirty steps and there it is. A tail end of a sturdy little lovable and much beloved cat, if only for a brief nine months. And I know she taught me so much about loving, about just opening up to more love in my life. Those charming little running jumps she took onto my lap when I sat down and she looked at me and I at her. Reminded me about how love multiplies. Made me think I could have another kid. But not today. Today is just for mourning the loss of my sweet little friend Moxie. She was such a relaxed, friendly presence in our lives over the last few months. Letting our daughter haul her around endlessly. You'd look at her and be sure she would be about to turn on N., but instead she'd be her ever-relaxed Raggedy Ann self. Tonight putting N. to bed, we talked about loving and losing and how every time you lose someone a little piece of your heart breaks. And how losing someone makes us think of the others we've loved who died before. Which always makes me think of my lost sister, which this time triggers the thought of my lost family. I look around at my constellation of family and think, it's a darned good thing I have such good friends, because I have a very unavailable family. Ah, such is the draw, I guess, for me and Moxie. We all have our responsibilities to one another, but we also have our own fates. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, always. xoxo to you wherever you are, miss moxie (and sophie and billy kitty and sam and herfie who I never got to meet and big old smiley wiley and cecil and stormy and roxanne and even little Martha kitty who everyone else thought was dumb but I knew she wasn't)