Moons, Meows, and Mortality

What's new on the mountain?
Maples are starting to turn.
The moon emerged from the clouds
just in time for us to watch Sunday's eclipse.
The jeep smells like skunk.
Above us, water was discovered on Mars.
We ran out of ice cream and I lost two pounds.
Chai the cat let a baby mouse escape in the house
and Ivan the cat is missing.

Two years ago

The ladder wouldn't reach Ivan

Luke's cat Ivan
was stuck in an oak beside the outhouse
for almost a week.
He was great at "up"
but not as good at "down."
He was unreachable by ladder
as well as the slightly higher
ladder-in-the-back-of-the-truck.
He was unmoved
by the aroma of canned catfood.
His meows were becoming faint
and the owl was literally calling his name
when we learned
that our neighbor Phil
owned The Biggest Ladder Of Them All.
Salvation.
Ivan loved days outside
and early evenings on Denny's lap
swiveling his plump head in all directions,
kneading,

Ivan, left, wants out

purring,
ecstatic.
The last time I saw Ivan
was one week ago.
He sat, tail twitching,
beside a young hemlock
as a flock of turkeys approached.
One was within pouncing distance
when Ivan reconsidered,
sprayed the area,
and stalked off,
cheeky,
but not foolish.
That evening,
he didn't come for supper.
In the days following
we have walked the woods,
calling,
listening for a faint meow
in case he was treed again.
No Ivan.
Enough time has now passed;
we think he won't return,
that he was consumed by a bobcat,
a coyote,
perhaps a fox.
We are sad.
Luke is somewhat consoled
because,
like the lion Jasmine
in the movie Secondhand Lions,
Ivan died with his boots on.
(Secondhand Lions. Our favorite movie. Watch it.)
Ivan started life
as an indoors-only Texas kitten
named Simba,
which means "lion" in Swahili.
He probably never imagined
the adventurous life of field and forest
and squirrel chasing
and being both predator
and prey.
It will be a while
before we stop listening for him,
and his DNA
may linger in the corners of the house
longer than we would like to admit.

Moon through spotting scope

There were three widows
at our Moon Party on Sunday night:
one whose husband died recently,
two weeks ago,
and two others
whose husbands also died recently,
two years ago.
Death of a loved one is always recent.
I have been told it is like an amputation,
phantom pain,
of feeling the presence of something,
once a vital part of you,
that is gone.
Every time I see Secondhand Lions
I think of how much my dad
would have loved that movie.
It's been twelve years since he died.

In hindsight,
at the Moon Party
I should have explained what happens during an eclipse,
an alignment called syzygy,
but I found myself instead
using the Bunny in the Moon
(much easier for me to see than the Man in the Moon)
to show the Apollo 11 landing site.
If the Sea of Tranquility is the bunny's head,
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on his nose.

The huge crater at the bottom of the moon
is Tycho,
named for Tycho Brahe,
a Danish polymath
who had his nose cut off in a duel
when he was young;
the fight
was over a mathematical equation.
He spent the rest of his life
with a metal nose glued to his face.
Brahe became very rich
and spent some of his money
on a tame elk
who lived in his house
and died after drinking too much beer
and falling down the stairs.
The elk, not Tycho.
Tycho died of a burst bladder
after attending a dinner with the queen.
Protocol stated that,
if she didn't leave the room,
no one else did either.
For years, his cause of death remained unconfirmed.
There was suspicion that he was poisoned by his assistant,
Johannes Kepler
who also has a moon crater named for him,
but Brahe's exhumation in 2010
proved Kepler innocent.
Tycho Brahe was said to have written his own epitaph:
He lived like a sage 
and died like a fool.

I may die like a fool as well.
There have been a few opportunities--
skiing into a waterfall overlook,
climbing onto a snake-infested ledge,
getting lost in the Alaskan forest,
losing control on a cliffside mountain trail.
This week I fell while writing "Moon Party"
in chalk in the middle of the highway.

There are many ways to die.
The trick is to live,
really live,
before you die.
Do what you were created to do
with great enthusiasm
and the occasional yodel,
or, in Ivan's case,
meow.
As they say in Secondhand Lions...

Farewell Ivan

"He really lived."