Farm Fresh Blog

I'm not a very religious person. It's been a while since I've been to church and other folks know the Bible a lot better than me, but I do talk to God all the time, and I try to be open to His side of the conversation.

I think this is the hardest part of every relation - listening to the other person. My experience has been that if you don't listen to His whisper, God will send a roar to get your attention. There are things I've learned to accept in life - when a door opens, when a door closes, and when God puts something in your path. If God sent it, there's a reason. I can jump up and down and screech "Why NOW? Why NOW of all times?! I don't have time for this?!" Or I can put my big girl panties on and do what we all do - call Mom for help.

The adventure went like this:

Driving home from my last official night at work as a police officer I am on the phone with my mother in deep discussion about packing for the Big Move. I am on the way to her house to pick up shelving for my closet. I have my mother on my ear piece, the radio is on, and my air conditioner is blaring. Over this I hear a dog barking. Since I'm on the county road not too far from my mom's, and since her dog sometimes goes walkabout, I stop the truck to check it out. Now here is the weird part - I'm on the phone with my mother, and I ask her if her dog is out, and she says "no" but I am still compelled to stop and investigate the barking. Who does that?

It is late. It is dark. My mother has already said her dog is in the house. Why did I stop? Why did I get out of the truck? In the darkness I see a large canine figure take evasive action. This dog clearly does not know me, nor does it want to know me. I shrug, get in the truck and drive off. Even I am confused by my own behavior.

And then I hear it. Over my mother talking in my ear, over the radio, over the air conditioning, over the truck engine, I hear the plaintive cry of a kitten. I slam on the brakes.

Once again I step out of the truck and walk back down the dark county road. Out of the darkness a tiny kitten amps up the volume on his cries.

"Stop! Stop! Wait! Help me, Biped! Help!"

He ran through the dark along the county road and into my arms. I stood on the highway and accepted my fate. My husband hates cats. I have 7 dogs in the house. I am in the middle of moving an entire farm all the way across the state. The absolute last thing I need is a kitten so tiny that he must stay inside the house for quite a while, BUT what are the odds that all these things would fall into place to allow me to be in the right place to save this little guy? Without these things lining up, the dog would have killed the kitten, or he would have been hit by a car on the highway. Instead I stopped when I heard the barking and the kitten flagged me down. How could I possibly hear his cries over all the noise in my truck? The kitten was nowhere near my truck when I stopped. How could I possibly hear his cries?

That, Friends & Neighbors, is when you stop questioning things and just accept that God has sent you another cat. Don't fight it. Just accept it and go on. My long-suffering mother agreed to care for him until we moved. She named him Pavarotti because he has a healthy set of lungs and he was singing an opera all night while locked in a dog crate. This is the same woman who named a cat, Ptolemy, when my stepfather told her not to name the next kitten the kind of common name that kids think up. His decree was probably in response to the white cat we had named Snowball and the tabby cat named Tiger. Enter Ptolemy. Since he was no student of Egyptian history, I KNOW he'd never heard of that name before. And as kids, we then had a reason to look up Egyptian history. My mother was a bit of a progressive.

And so it was that in the middle of moving a farm across Texas, God sent us another family member. Meet Pavarotti. I must assume he is destined for great things.