Back to Beauty

...amidst one of the darker passages of our lives.

I felt bad leaving “Holler at the Squalor” up for so long without some sort of follow-up or reply. I don’t mean to be down on my town. I don’t mean to be down, period, but it’s been impossible to avoid these last few weeks.

Riding the county road towards the main highway.

The atmospheric magnification of the San Juan Mountains is impressive today.

I joked with my wife that I missed those days when I was depressed for no good reason at all. She didn’t take that well. Inappropriate humor aside, I think fondly upon those sleepy late summer days of 2016 shortly after we moved to the San Luis Valley. For all my gloom at having to move (it was not much of a choice) and adjust to new surroundings it was truly another world in which we didn’t have anything to seriously worry about. 

All that changed in November 2017 when my friend Steven died unexpectedly, and then I was diagnosed with cancer the following April. Any time I see something online with a byline of 2018 I think, “My Cancer Year.”

I was able to get more or less past that transitional phase, though. More than I’d thought I would, given what’s going on now. 

The view from the road behind the supermarket on the far west side of town.

The thing about living around mountains is they look different every day, at any given time of day, due to clouds and the position of the sun.

I liked how the snowfield shone with reflected sunlight.

The bills are coming due, though, so to speak. I’d written last month about our elderkitty Otis and how he’s entered his last days. As expected, he’s gotten worse. 

It was Thursday morning, 20 February, when my wife and I watch as Otis voided his bladder on the floor. That was bad enough, but it was seeing his once magnificent, fluffy tail dragging in the puddle that did it. We’d sworn to each other that when it got to the point that Otis was lying around in his own filth, we’d have him put down. We wouldn’t want to live this way. This is no way to spend one’s final days.

Or so we keep telling ourselves. I put off driving to a recommended local veterinarian for consultation on Friday because the idea of setting our 18-year-old cat’s last day on Earth was too much. 

I might have stitched these two photos together but we’d lose out on the beauty of these peaks. Pretend you’re looking from left to right, and note the strange, almost perfectly conical peaks you only see west of Monte Vista towards Del Norte.

It was bad enough thinking this would be his last weekend with us. After all, we had to set the date for sooner than later. We have to clean his waste from the floor every day. He doesn’t always hit the pad we put down for him.

I’ve had to come to terms with the ugly fact that my grief is more for me than it is for Otis. He’s a familiar sight of nearly two decades that’s going away. In his elderly decrepitude, he reminds my wife and I of what’s shortly ahead for us.

Meanwhile, we can’t be cleaning these messes up three times or more a day. Otis may well wear us down before he finally wears out.... 

Oh, enough of that. Of course he won’t. We’ll call the vet. The vet will carve out time from his or her schedule to drive the mile and a half to our house sometime over the course of the week. I rather like that I won’t know the exact day.

Also, the bill for having our first family pet professionally murdered at home won’t be too large. I also have a specific credit card for such emergencies, new tires, oil changes and so on.

I’m grateful we can do this much. One might as well approach this from a position of gratitude, because no amount of tears and grieving will reverse the natural aging process few (if any) cats in the wild are afforded. This was a bill due, a corner to be turned. We knew these days were coming. We’ll do the best we can.

These are the same peaks and ridge we see behind the supermarket, but two miles west down the highway out of town. I think this mountain is called Pintada, with Windy Mountain to the left and behind it, but that’s as best I can do from the maps, and I probably stink at this.

This, I’m sure, is Green Ridge.  It blocks a lot, but by no means all of the weather coming up from New Mexico.

We can wallow in the misery and squalor, or we can lift our eyes and hearts up to the beauty and love and life that also endures in the world. Otis won’t be here to enjoy the coming spring and summer with us. But the spring and summer are coming, whether any of us are here for it or not. There’s a comfort in that I can’t articulate, so I won’t.

I’ll just take in as much joy and life and beauty and love as I find available and do the best I can.

By the way, my work-in-progress is going well. There’s that. More on that later.

Sunrises and sunsets photograph the same, in case that means anything.

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.