fill it up again
Dear Brother,
Remember the time when Princess, the stray cat we adopted as an outside cat, gave birth to four kittens, but abandoned two? It was cold--the end of October--and rainy. The rain was more like liquid ice and we found the abandoned kittens under a neighbor's porch. They were dead already and Mom & Dad put them in plastic ziplock baggies. Mom and Dad told us to bury them if we didn't want to throw them in the outside garbage. Instead, we snuck them into your room. Do you remember? And we closed your bedroom door. Staring at the soaking wet kittens in the baggies, we thought we could save them; bring them back to life. You tried rubbing one to warmth within the baggie. I tried pressing on the tiny rib cage--urging it to breathe. Your efforts resulted in a warm lifeless kitten with matted fir. My efforts only produced pink foam from the mouth of mine. Didn't it seem impossible at the time that something so newly alive could be so quickly dead? Dear brother, do you remember how we tried?