Some Days are Diamonds and Some Days are Coal

From John Steinbeck in his book, East of Eden:
 
"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.  It happens to nearly everyone.  You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite.  It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms.  The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet.  Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes.  A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and the trees of him dark and somber.  The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale.  And then--the glory---so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes.  Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.  And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories.  It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world.  It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men."

I've felt the glories, long and strong and there have been many.

But those who feel the glories also encounter the gray and after Cloudy's death yesterday, a horrible screaming painful death, I have been living in the gray.

I don't question why he had to die.  There are no answers to that.  I don't ask some faceless imagined super alien in the sky why it happened.  That would be silly.

I watched a little cat lose his life.  That was hard.  I will get over it.

Cloudy's little body is buried now, in the dirt, will return to dirt, make something new of himself.

I have to get along with my life.

 Goodbye little guy.

Meanwhile I'm trying to figure out who is who among the other Lebanon colony cats here.   Many look so much alike.

I know Willy.  This is he:

And Vino is the big guy, wants to be a tame boy....

This, I believe, but am not sure, is Storm.  See I sent Flopsy, another gray short hair, up to Odd Cat Out, with Thunder, the big black male.  At least I think I sent Flopsy and not Storm.  I need to make sure, but I'm fairly sure this is Storm:

This one is easy....Mopsy McMuffin....

Then there are the four long hairs--Bluebell, Gracie, Di Vinci, the only male, and Hawkeye.  I know Bluebell and Gracie have white chest spots and that Hawkeye does not.  But Di Vinci, I'm not sure.

This is Bluebell for sure....

And this I believe is Hawkeye....

It's Gracie and Di Vinci I must distingish.

Besides the four gray short hairs---Willy, Vino, Storm and Mopsy, and the four long hairs--Hawkeye, Di Vinci, Bluebell and Gracie, there are the easy ones, Huckleberry and Mona Lisa, the adult sister muted tortis and easy to tell apart, Rosy, the young fiery muted torti teen, and Arrow, the young black male.  If only they could all be so easy.