I’m grateful for cactus blossoms indoors. I’m grateful that Topaz is alive after a complicated tumble, though she may have suffered a concussion. If it’s not one thing, it’s another… so went the joke while I was ‘growing up.’ Now, grown up, it doesn’t seem so funny, yet sometimes you just have to chuckle.

Yesterday evening she took a complicated spill from the sunroom table in her felt nest bed, and she hasn’t been quite right since. First, hiding upstairs. Not coming for treats. Staying way too still. Then, this morning, slow-motion creeping down the stairs one at a time, tiptoeing, as if feeling her way. It occurred to me she couldn’t see. Her eyes didn’t track the vet’s fingers, nor blink as I thought they should, nor her pupils contract with his flashlight. Yet when he put her on the floor and nudged her to walk, she leapt with certainty to the high silver table, landing like a feather. This impressed him and seemed diagnostic: to do that she must be fine. I thought, Maybe she’s not dying, but she could do that blindfolded. Her carrier was up there, the smell of it, the hard edge of the table. She could be less than blind and very compromised, and still make that leap.

Anyway, he let her go with a steroid shot and an oral antibiotic and instructions for me to give her pills for 3 days. That’ll be a trial. Or, at least, that’s my expectation. She could surprise me and be docile. Then the car battery was dead. There was someone there to give me a jump. I was grateful. Then I left the clinic, after waiting in the claustrophobic exam room for 45 minutes, in a pandemic, in the county in the state with the worst infection rate, in a state with the most increasing cases in the nation. The wise thing to do for myself and my cat was walk out unattended.

Then the car battery was dead. There was someone to give me a jump. I was grateful. I hightailed it home, surrendered. Grateful for a live cat, a live battery, getting home, kindling already split, a hot shower, soft pants, a warm fire, a zoom meeting, a single ice-cold martini. Accepting what is. Get me to my bed on time! If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Or so it seemed in that moment, that refractory period where emotions cloud perspective. Remember yesterday, and the cosmos? Chill out.