Br’er Cat and the Heat Tape
Randy was nothing if not oldtime Vermont and for some reason he used to cut the tails off the kittens which his cat presented him. Not sure why and I didn’t ask, but they were wicked good mousers and looked like mini-bobcats which may have been part of Randy’s plan to scare the hell out of the mice if nothing else.
I’m not a great lover of cats, but I loved this one as she became integral to our survival in the winter. Named her Br’er Cat, an homage to Joel Chandler Harris, author of my favorite stories Grandma Moon used to read to me. From the day she set foot in the house, running water was never again an issue.
As we grow older I find we’ve lost some of that back woods independence. We still live in Vermont, but we’ve matured and taken on the responsibility of real jobs and family and find ourselves too busy to be independent. We call people to fix things we used to fix ourselves. The driveway is plowed and the wood is dropped off. A plumber does what I once could do myself.
Now that the children are grown, the girl in the striped socks and I now laugh and talk about ending up in a place the size of the one in which we started, a simpler place where we might to some extent revive our independent nature and rediscover who we were—a place like the one where the only things we depended upon were each other, a dog for heat and a cat for running water. ◊
Paul Fersen, aka Bucko, is a regular columnist for STRATTON MAGAZINE.