Friends

I have discovered that I enjoy multiple versions of communicating with my friends every day. This is a very strange thing for me. Most of my life, my friends had to pass the high or low maintenance test. It's all right to be high maintenance for a little while but then friends had to be low maintenance for a while. And only one could be high maintenance at a time. Poor thing, “I can help you with that – next week.”

That may seem like a lot of rules for friends but a lot of them know they could call me in a barroom brawl and I’d show up to help. I have been very lucky in many things, but mostly in my friends. I can’t imagine some of the things I have put friends through. I am not always communicative. One poor friend sent me coffee in Pakistan almost every month, way after my own mother quit sending it. I have friends I haven’t seen in years but if I call them, it is like old times right away. There is no loss of time between friends.

Facebook does something for me that I haven't experienced before-- even through MySpace which I barely learned to use. It seemed like MySpace took a lot of work to keep track of things that were going on -- the whole high maintenance issue. (It was all too much trouble.) But with facebook, I have discovered that I like having a lot of friends from different places in my life. It has been very interesting to participate with friends from different places in my life -- altogether in one place.

Late one night, I posted on Facebook about how happy I am with my friends. Within minutes I had people -Like-.

The Wild Life in my Back Yard

This time I am not talking about the children.

When one of our cats disappeared two and a half weeks ago, I searched every where I could think. I read everything I could find about how to find a cat. I knocked on doors, checked garages, asked about sheds. The problem was that the cat who disappeared, our Isaac, is a huge cat with a very small voice. I also explored the ravine behind the houses across the street, blithely passing all the no trespassing signs because I know the cat couldn't read. In the ravine, it was a little like being completely cut off from the rest of the world. The trees were huge, the poison ivy rampant, the world dark.

I have recently learned from neighbors that there is a plethora of missing pets in the neighborhood and that the police told one of them there are coyotes in the neighborhood, well at least one. WHAT??? Yes, I live in a small city but we are not out west and not up north. Up north is where they have bears and coyotes and wolves and all that.

And it is the recent building into the out spaces that have intruded on the land that wild animals live and caused them displacement. My neighborhood? Noooooo. My neighborhood is built up to within an inch of its life -- except for that ravine.

And now, talking to neighbors and friends a little farther out, I have discovered that one of them has found cougar prints out past the back yard of her home. There have also been sightings of a cougar on a golf course. My head must have been firmly planted in the sand. How did all this wild life get here? Why didn't anyone warn me?