The Word of the Day was "Cling"

So, the word of the day at Milk Wood was "cling."  And I thought... "How appropriate..."

Jami T. sits down with her muse at Milk Wood's "Writer's Dash."

You see Milk Wood does this lovely "Writer's Dash" each day.  They give us a word and ask us to write for fifteen minutes, brilliance not required of course but surely appreciated, and then we pass around our note cards (when SL is willing to let us save of course) and oooh and ahhhh over each other's fifteen minutes of inspirational genius.

But the word of the day at Milk Wood was "cling."

As a little girl, I once clung to a cat's ear.  Don't laugh... I'm serious.

My little gray cat Rusher, whom I adored, was let out by accident one day.  I was a touch over ten years old, and she came back the next day, battered and bruised and scratched.  There was a particularly nasty cut on her left ear.  My mother bandaged her up and put ointment on the wounds the best she could, as a visit to the veterinary during those days was not just a luxury, but an impossibility.

My cat slept with me at night, often under the covers, sidling up against the small of my back.  She thought she was a dog, perhaps, as she often curled up near my feet during meal times, though she never begged even for a scrap.  On my birthday she had kittens in my closet... in my toy box, and when I found her and the litter (there were only two, and both were female) she'd purred and squinted her eyes in pride.

So when her ear fell off, as a ten year old child who clung (perhaps desperately) to anything "good" in her life, I took it, wailing, to my mother.

"Throw that out." She said.  "It's nasty.  Rusher will live.  It's just her ear."

And I remember looking down at the withered gray flap in my hand thinking, "How can I throw away part of my friend?"  And so I wrapped the little bit of my cat in a Kleenex tissue and hid it in the bottom drawer of a small jewelry box on my dresser.  I told myself, "I can hold on to this part of her, so that when the day comes, she can be buried whole."  And, that was how it happened.  A year later, when my cat died, I brought out the ear and silently slipped it in the shoe-box with Rusher.  My mother  just shook her head and said nothing.

And so, I know that there is a part of my that clings to things, desperately.  Even, perhaps, to the point of despair.  But only because there is a part of me that is incredibly and indelibly loyal to anything that becomes part of my world. 

It is like that even now.  At present, I feel like there is an "ear" in my jewelry box.  And I hope that it stays there...  I have no desire to bring it out and put it in the shoe box.