is what i do

Melissa crawled under the cabin Friday evening, and, sometime during the night, breathed her last. We found her there Saturday morning. Through the last few days, her breathing had become labored; her appetite had vanished; a couple of days before she died, she stopped purring when we stroked her. Life, for her, had clearly become desperately uncomfortable, and, had she made it through to Monday, we would have sought a vet to have her discomfort put to an end. I’m glad that Melissa made her choice before we had to make that one.

We put her body in an old pillow case that we no longer used, one that she had slept on many times. We weighted it with rocks, sailed with our friends (and hers) the Hudsons, out to the deep water between the Head of the Cape and Pond Island, and released her, to be reclaimed by the waters that she spent so many hours, over the years, watching, with who knows what emotion or comprehension.

Melissa was a good cat; gentle with kids, responsive, easy on the furniture. She was a patient traveler and loved her annual visits to Maine. Up until a few years ago, she’d be out at night up here, hunting in the woods and eating what she caught. She was companionable; not a lap sitter, but one who sat beside you and purred when you stroked her. Whenever possible, she was where we were, sleeping on my bed or my office desk or the porch glider or her basket on the kitchen work table. She seems to have enjoyed our company, and we enjoyed hers.

We will miss her. Here is a movie we made of her unceremonious burial in beautiful Penobscot Bay.

(At home, Spring has been around a while, and is close to turning hot into Summer. But we are in Maine, where Spring comes late, and these pictures, which I took last week on a cool foggy morning, reminded me of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s wonderful little poem…)

There is some exceptional science writing in the blogs. Over at Brent Rasmussen’s Unscrewing the Inscrutable, DarkSyd has posted Cosmology 101: Somewhere Over the Rainbow. With grace, style, rigor and admirable concision, and with some fine illustrations, Syd retells one of the classic tales of science:

The hero of the story, of course, is Edwin Hubble, and the story concerns his discovery of the fact that our entire universe is expanding, rapidly.

The only bone I have to pick with DarkSyd’s otherwise excellent article is in his first sentence, in which he dismisses the Pot of Gold Hypothesis as “only a legend of course”. As evidence otherwise, I present the following photograph, taken a couple of years ago from the deck of Fairview, the cabin we stay in at Hiram Blake Camp, on Penobscot Bay in Maine. It was an early morning double rainbow, and it was entirely contained within the small cove on the shore of which our cabin sits. One leg of the rainbow entered the water in front of the pine trees on the farther shore, and the other leg ended exactly at the stern of our little sailboat Anjana. And while a quick investigatory row out to the boat found no literal gold, still, Anjana is worth her weight in the stuff, and the rainbow, we like to think, was a confirmation of her true worth.