Gonna hitch a ride...

The older I get the more depressing Thanksgiving is.  When I was young the dining room table was bursting at the seams.  At our biggest gathering there was...hmm...my maternal grandparents, both my uncles, Mama, Daddy, my sister and me, my grouchy great-aunt who loved dolls, and my aunt on my daddy's side.  <pauses to count>  That's ten of us, enuff that Aunt on Daddy's Side, Sister, and I all had to sit at the card table.  During meal prep Uncle from St. Louis took us kids over to the school playground to keep us out of the kitchen, and true to stereotypical fashion the women cooked and the men did nothing.  But it was a good Thanksgiving, warm and filled with love and delicious food.  Nowadays with a lot of the adults being deceased and us kids being grown, well...y'know.  Sister, Brother-in-Law, and Uncle From St. Louis all elected not to battle the traffic and the weather, so this year it's Mama, Uncle Man-Child, and me.  Mama and I did all the cooking and all the cleaning, while Uncle Man-Child sat on his a$$, asked stupid questions, and told stupid half-truths about himself.  I couldn't say a word to Mama, even in a whisper, without him demanding to be included in the conversation.  And this guy is a few years shy of seventy!  You'd think he was still thirteen!  I suggested to Mama that we just skip Thanksgiving this year, but she wouldn't hear of it, so here we are.  Add to that the fact that I had to bury another cat this past weekend, and you've got one sad Moon Girl. 

Yep, another cat.  Week before last it was Lola, and last weekend it was Edgar, one of my mom's cats.  Edgar was solid black, and that earned him the name "Edgar," after Edgar Allan Poe.  My aunt found him at the bank when he was just a kitten, and he was a knucklehead from the word "go."  Before he was a year old he'd swan-dived off our kitchen table and broken his foot, and we had to doctor him through that.  Three weeks in a cast and in a cage, three more without the cast but still in a cage...I don't know who hated it more, him or us!  The foot healed at a slight angle and Edgar limped on it a tiny bit, but he didn't let it slow him down.  He lived to be twelve, insisted on going outside a lot even if it was raining, and last Friday night it apparently caught up with him.  I found him the next morning in a neighbor's yard.  He didn't have an outward mark on him, no blood or cuts or anything, but his spine was twisted in a way that spines are not supposed to twist, and his pelvic area was flattened a bit.  Based on that I believe that he was hit by a car and managed to drag himself out of the road before dying.  Sigh...we knew that was a possibility when he went outside, but if you've ever owned a cat then you know how difficult it can be to keep them inside.  Mama's other two cats couldn't care less about going out, but Edgar had to be the oddball.  He was always the oddball, the one who liked to run around like a wild ape, the one who wanted to be the first to the food, the one who liked to lie on his back so the sun could warm his belly.  I have a picture of him doing that.

He loved the sun.  That may have been the reason why he liked going outside; when the A/C ran in the summertime it would get cold in the house, so he went where it was warm.  Then going outside became a habit, and that was that.  We see how it ended, but thank God, I at least know what happened to him and I was able to bury him properly.  He didn't disappear into thin air like a friend's cat did recently.  But it still hurt.

All that has culminated in me being unusually depressed, and unlike times in the past I can't seem to shake it.  Even playing with my dolls has brought me little pleasure, but I do it anyway.  As always, my doll is Rita Cheryl, and today she is...decidedly oddly dressed, much more so than she was last Thanksgiving.

Pandas, Boston and Doctor Who.  What a combo.  Anyway, it's warmer today than it was at the beginning of the week, so Rita Cheryl did a little traipsing around in Grandma's backyard.  She isn't as young as Camille and thus didn't dream up a ton of imaginary games, but she did find a nice hiding place.

She also found a nice pinecone.  Dern thing was sharp, though!

I will admit that while Thanksgiving leaves me feeling melancholy, it's still a helluva lot better than this past summer, when things were so cotton-pickin' hot.  Probably by the time April rolls around I'll be longing for thunderstorms, LOL.  Right now I'm just tired and overwhelmed.  I'm ready for the mold to be gone from my house, ready for the water to be back on at Mama's, ready for spring...time for a nap!  Don't wait up!

Love, 

RagingMoon1987