The Back End of the Storm

I am tired and depressed and irritable.

Pretty usual for after a clinic and taking care of extra cats.

I'm not young anymore and soon to be officially a year older.

I've overdone things lately in helping everybody else.  Feeling that lately.

It's snowing again tonight.

I took the RV cats back today.   I wasn't happy when she changed the numbers on me.  She'd told me there were nine more needing fixed.  I told her before I took these four back I had appointments lined up Monday, enough to get all 9 done and be done with it.  She seemed happy about that.

So I drove up with the four fixed yesterday to return them.  There is still slush on side roads in Lebanon and snow still coating most lawns.

She tells me now three of those left are pregnant and she's not getting them done.   Inside, when I hear this, my stomach ties up into a huge knot and seems to press up against my heart and it begins to thud.  I try to hold my tongue but its harder when I'm tired.

I tell her nobody will want those kittens, that the rescue that took a bunch of them last summer when she was at a county park, still has some of them, they were so ill.  I beg her please not to do that to those poor females, who have had too many litters already, that it runs them down and that there are too many cats now and does she know the resources it would take, to spay and neuter all those kittens and then find them homes, and that so many now need homes. I reminded her of her girl I just returned, having an infected uterus and again begged on behalf of the girls, to let them be done with all that.  I'm begging on behalf of the cats of Oregon, basically, to stop breeding more. 

Suddenly she changes her tune and story and says there are really only now seven cats left needing fixed, that she gave away two of them. "Really? I say.  "In the last two days, when the snow storm clogged up everything, you found homes for two?  Really?"

 Oh for the love of.....she's back to playing games with me.  I left.  I told her before I left I'd be there then Saturday for 7 cats and to please please let me know if she's not going to have seven cats Saturday so I can find other cats and not waste spay neuter reservations.

People stomp on the souls of sincere volunteers eager to solve a very solvable problem and inhibited only in doing so by people and their ways.

I was disgusted when I drove off, angry, and I wanted to cry.   Being played is not a fun game when my part is receiver.

I drove on to the park to feed the boys and try to find some nature or peace.   The park was several inches under a blanket of snow.  Limbs and even trees had fallen too, from the weight of it.  The area where I fed the boys was not even recognizable anymore.   However, there was a beauty to the blanketed park, a silence.  No bird even sang.