The Things Which Remain

It’s amazing how hopeful spring feels. It’s not that the work day gets shorter or the toddler behavior less challenging, or the to-do list shorter, or the obligations less demanding, but something about the brighter longer days make life circumstances seem not just bearable but enjoyable.

Maybe its knowing that when things get too tense inside, we have the ability to push our kids and ourselves out the back door to play in the grass. Maybe it’s a renewed interest in exercise, that makes me feel so awake and alert. Maybe it’s this long warm March that looks suspiciously like it will merge peacefully with April. Whatever it is, I am feeling positively euphoric lately.

Of course the fact that I have identically duplicated my favorite green tea drink from Tea Garden at home could have something to do with this fresh and enthusiastic outlook on life. Even though this day will be filled with cleaning, including the project I’ve been putting off since we moved into this house eight months ago: scrubbing the bathroom floor. Ug; my least favorite project of all time. I’m a pretty tidy person. I like things to be clean. But when it comes to the bathroom floor, I just can’t quite get there. But alas, the tile floor looks more like a shag carpet and it simply must be done.

But even the prospect of scrubbing dense clusters of lint and hair and old cat vomit stains cannot quell the inner joy that comes from shaking my own green jasmine tea with agave nectar. Even my daughter is obsessed with this delicious tea. It is perhaps the perfect drink.

Part II

After cleaning my bathroom floors, I am served a potent reminder of why I never clean my bathroom floors. Not only is it exhausting to crawl around on hands and knees scrubbing as you go; it is also just really gross. The hot steam from the soapy water served to vaporize the old remains of cat puke (tiddy pook, as my daughter called it when she was two) so that even now after the third scrubbing, the bathroom has the merest odor of stomach acid and bile.

Yesterday the cats opened the refrigerator and helped themselves to the Hawaiian pizza leftovers (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so I came home to chucks of pineapple and Canadian bacon mixed with stomach bile all over the bathroom floor. And though I do believe that variety is the spice of life, finding people food in one of the six vomits left lovingly around the house is really not what I have in mind.

Sometimes it saddens me that my daughter’s whole life reality has always included having to watch where you walk. One of her first sentences, after ‘Mommy, tiddy pook,’ was ‘I didn’t get it on my foot.’

Fortunately kids are resilient. They manage to survive the horrors of owning pets. Pets remind us as growing children that life is not always kind. When my sister’s male gerbil tore to shreds and ate most of his pregnant female companion, we simply observed the aftermath with interested distaste: well this is an unfortunate way to start the day. We removed the disembodied tale and took turns feeling the silky rope; then set to work planning the funeral.

My childhood is littered with ‘ah-ha’ moments courtesy of our family pets. I learned from my parakeet Safire that a bird cage should not be kept on the radiator in the fall when any given day might be the first day that the heat comes on; I learned from our old black lab mutt mix that dogs will eat anything, even the contents of my brother’s diaper. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about sex and reproduction from our unneutered puppy and fiercely horny cat.

For some reason we keep buying and caring for small animals. Even though they puke on our furniture, claw our clothes and our flesh, depend on us to remove their feces, show us the most carnal and violent sides of nature, and eventually break our hearts; we keep bringing them in.

And now Twila wants a mouse. She is not bothered by our cats the way I am so it shouldn’t surprise me that she doesn’t share my dream of an animal-less house. But I didn’t expect these requests to begin so soon. “A real mouse!” she reminds me.

And maybe my dream of a clean house without the worry and maintenance of pets is not just an unrealistic vision but an unfair one too. I think after bringing home my eleventh stray cat my destiny as a parent who would have to deal with pets, was sealed.

And maybe it’s not so bad. Its spring after all; a time of hope and newness and fresh starts. Why shouldn’t my daughter get the opportunity to experience the humor, joy and sorrow of loving an animal? It’s a facet of life we’re all entitled to experience, I think. So when the puking cats are gone, when Jada is not in diapers and the mouse has run away, and spring is here again after a few more winters, we’ll get a puppy who will drive us crazy, keep us up at night, ruin our furniture and eventually break our hearts. But at least I will still have my shaken green tea with agave nectar.