Category: Thought of the Day

A few days ago, I lost a beloved family pet.

He wasn’t just any ol’ cat with bushy tabby/white-colored fur, crinkled up ear, and eyes too big for his head. Nor was he a simple companion for the sole purpose of entertainment.

He was family.

 

If Mischief could talk, he would never say who his favorite human was, though it was pretty obvious. He and my father were inseparable. So much so, that when I had come home from a week’s vacation and went to collect him and my other cat from my parents, they politely told me I could only bring Pepper home with me. Mischief was staying with them. No if’s and/or but’s. Arguments were futile.

In the short time we had Mischief (only 3-4 years even though he was 7), this little furry bundle wormed his way deep into our hearts and confidently planted himself there. The first day he met my parents, instead of running away and hiding under my bed, he asked my father to pick him up. Instead of trying to steal food from our plates, he would ask for hugs and rub his mouth all over our ears.

Mischief didn’t have the greatest start in this life. Most of his early years are unknown, but what I do know is by the time he was 4, he had 5 previous owners. It wasn’t because he was a destructive cat or anything – he was actually one of the sweetest cats I’ve ever met – it was the people. It seemed like no matter who took him in, they were either heavy into drugs, always moving, or something else. And yet, when it was my turn to have him, he was still as lovable and sweet as could be.

True to his name, Mischief was the embodiment of all things naughty and pranks. One of his favorite pastimes was to open up all the cupboards and rummage through all the dishes stored in them. He also liked to sit on the kitchen table and wait for people to come home, slowly wagging his great big bushy tail and blink at us while purring away when he knew he wasn’t supposed to be up there. And yet, his prankster behavior would always be made up by mewing these tiny girly squeaks and then sitting on his hind legs, reaching up for a hug.

Without even a warning, this cat had us wrapped around his little paws.

The point I’m trying to make is that to anyone else in this world, he was just a cat. He was just a four-legged creature that happened to live under the same roof as us humans.

But to my family, he was more. He was a wonderful bright light in this dark world, always ready to make us laugh. He was the best snuggler known to humanity. He loved without measure or limit.

We didn’t just lose a cat on Wednesday… we lost a chunk of our hearts. We lost a member of our family.

A family isn’t only made out of a mommy, daddy, and human children. It’s made out of all sorts of different shapes and sizes: some families have two mommies, some have two daddies, and some have a mom, a dad, one human kid, and 4-5 furry children. A family member is still a family member, no matter the species.

Not going to lie, it’s going to be a while before our hearts begin to heal. It’s something that we’re going to have to grieve on in our own time. It’s what you do when you lose a family member. So for now, we grieve, we remember, and we pray he’s up in Heaven, chasing leaves, lounging in the sun, and snuggling with our other loved ones waiting for us to join them.

I’ve been out of school for roughly a couple years now.

For the most part, it feels pretty good: no more hours upon hours of homework, no more studying until the first bleak rays of early morning for tests, and no more having to ride an elongated banana of a bus with well-worn pleather seats that reek of cleaning solutions.

And yet, I can not for the life of me shake that just-before-school feeling.

You know the one I’m talking about: that tiny little nugget of excitement that fills your belly when you walk past a back-to-school supplies sale. That sense of packing your things into a new backpack for the first day of school. Seeing your friends again while being surrounded by desks, magic-erase boards, and rows upon rows of lockers.

But that’s only half of the back to school coin.

The other half… not as much fun. I’m talking about having to wake up at the crack of dawn Monday through Friday, haunting the kitchen like a half-alive zombie in search of cereal and a bowl. (Not necessarily in that order! Believe me, I’ve made that mistake too many times to dare count.) Preparing lunches because you forgot to get it all together the night before…again. And don’t even get me started on sharing the bathroom in the morning.  When you grow up in a relatively small two-bedroom farm house with only one closet-sized bathroom, things can get pretty hairy in a blink of a sleep-encrusted eye.

Then again, now that I think about it, this is pretty much what adults have to deal with, only it’s 24/7. Instead of getting up before the sun pokes above the tree tops to get on the bus, I have to get up to make sure I get adequate bathroom time. Instead of having homework to bring home and fuss  over, I have to rush and get everything finished before I can jump in my car and run away for the night. And instead of having to deal with grumpy teachers who would rather be anywhere else than in the classroom, I have the pleasure of working with customers who don’t know what they’re doing, and yet still have the firm belief that everything is my fault.

Which brings me to vacation. While students get to have whole summers away from educational institutions, no matter how great or disastrous they may be, grown-ups who don’t work in the educational field don’t get to have that luxury. Instead, depending on how long they may have worked at a job, they can have a range of one to two weeks of precious vacation. That’s it. two weeks. Maybe more if they’ve spent more than 10 or so years at a business. For most places, the vacation is paid. Some places, such as fast-food restaurants, don’t even give you that. If you want a vacation, then you have to plan for that allotted time without a regular source of income.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say in a round-about way is: While school seems to be a soul-sucking institution of unusual punishment at times, it’s a lot better than having to live as a functioning adult to society.

Can I go back to being a kid and dealing with just school?

I love to bake.

It’s one of the first hobbies I learned to do and partake in, aside from reading and exploring the Great Outdoors (and by Great Outdoors, I mean the woods of my backyard.)

It wasn’t something that my Mom or my Dad exclusively taught me, either. In fact, a lot of my baking nods go to the combined effort my Mom and my Nana put in while I grew up. Some of my oldest memories come from standing on a tiny stool my Grampa had tucked away in the coat closet, with my nose dangerously close to the giant mint-green ceramic bowl Nana was using, sniffing whatever magical concoction she was whipping up.

I especially love to bake when I’m not feeling well. Not anything like the flu or the common cold, mind you, but more along the lines when my body has aches and pains that just won’t go away. For instance, I have recently gone on a new form of birth control where, apparently, it is not unusual for a woman to go into a menstrual cycle for two weeks straight. This includes cramps, mid to severe mood swings, and the urge to cry and scream bloody murder at the next person who happens to walk by and scratch their nose. For the record, I did apologize to the poor unfortunate soul at the end of that sudden rampage.

On one of my worse days, I decided to stay home and veg out while my body adjusts to the medicine. During the day, I slept, cuddled with my furlings, and cleaned some to keep my entertainment levels up – weird, I know. And on a stroke of energetic feel-good happiness, I padded into the freshly washed kitchen and started pulling ingredients from the cupboards.

Now, here I should mention that I had tried baking brownies a few weeks ago with an old recipe I had found buried in my mom’s cooking drawer. The description sounded so good on the crumpled yellow paper that I had to try it. Here’s the kicker: instead of using the melted butter the recipe called for, I decided to substitute mashed pumpkin from a can.

The idea was I wanted to have some pumpkin-chocolate muffins (one of the few pumpkin-flavored treats I actually like – you can’t even taste the pumpkin in it!) but have it in a brownie form. Normally, we make the pumpkin-chocolate muffins with premixed brownie fixings from a box and one can of mashed pumpkin. But that night I was feeling somewhat ambitious. So, I substituted the butter for the pumpkin and went to town with mixing and blending the ingredients.

The house smelled amazing. It was as if I had locked myself inside a professional-grade bakery and all the ovens were spitting out trays of ready-made pumpkin-chocolate brownies every ten minutes.

But the fantasy ended when I came back to reality and pulled out my own tray of pumpkin-chocolate brownies. The treats themselves were almost as flat as pancakes, and looked like they were better off as bricks for a fire house. Instead of tasting like chocolaty goodness with hidden healthy pumpkin, they were the equivalent of licking cocoa-dusted oak tree bark.

That tray of gross excuse of brownies sat on the counter, with only three square-sized holes cut in them for a week before I decided to throw them out. It would be obvious for me to say I wasn’t feeling all that great about myself that week.

But, in true LaBree fashion, instead of accepting that I wasn’t that great of a cook and finding something else to do, I thought about that recipe. I turned it over and over in my head like a pebble being tumbled in a river’s current. I dissected the recipe as if I were some mad scientist hell-bent on becoming the next Dr. Frankenstein and creating the perfect human specimen.

Which brings us back to when my body was actively attempting to reject my birth control and leaving me as a ball of pain and misery in the process. With little else to keep my interest on my abdomen feeling like it was a hot sticky waterfall caught on a never-ending fire, I threw the ingredients of a new recipe together and hoped for the best.

This time, I’m pretty sure these brownies won’t last long… in a good way, of course.