Emily Dickinson and Me, part 1: A Tail of Two Cities

It’s 5:53 a.m., and I really should be sleeping, because there’s nothing I need to do all morning but catch up on my email and bake a pecan pie.  But Emily Dickinson is keeping me awake. 

I’m not complaining, though.  In fact, I have many reasons to be grateful.  The day before yesterday, I had to wake up at a quarter to four in order to catch a plane.  It’s not like I was up all night fretting about Emily Dickinson or anything, although anyone who has nothing more serious today to worry about than distress over Emily Dickinson should truly give thanks.  And it’s not because Emily is being particularly active and noisy right now, although at the moment, she’s scratching in her box.  I just thought I should share the story about Emily and me.  This is a long story, and it will take several days.

When my niece Elizabeth and her husband were living in London, they managed to befriend a very reclusive kitten.  She was so terrified of strangers and so slow to warm up to people that they gave her the name Emily Dickinson.  They didn’t ask me for my advice about whether to bring her with them when he got his new job in Kansas City and they moved in with my mother, Elizabeth’s grandmother. My mother had been living for over forty years in a house that had become much too big for her, and she had a finished nice suite of rooms in the attic, with the same matched set of bedroom furniture I used as a teenager, and a nice newish sofa.  They only asked for my advice about scratching posts.   Of course my cats have always preferred something like a sofa to a scratching post, but I told them sisal makes a better scratching post cover than carpet fabric.   I’ve learned enough over the years about the destructive power of cats, and I thought this notion of theirs that they could stop Emily from scratching my mother’s furniture was overly optimistic.

It proved to be an interesting experiment for a while.  “The kids” as my mother calls them, decided that living in a five-bedroom house with the grandmother was not the best arrangement for them, so they found a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood they preferred.  Together with Emily and the new scratching post, they left the grandmother and the nice newish sofa behind and moved into the two-bedroom apartment.  Here I am now, writing from their apartment, having gotten back to sleep, gotten a good rest, having made and filled a piecrust, and waiting for the pie to bake so we can take it to the dinner with my mother. 

The kids also decided that living in a five-bedroom house was not the best arrangement for the grandmother, especially since the grandfather is now in a nursing home.  The rest of the family, all the friends, and the various legal, medical, financial, and social advisors in our family’s life also agreed that it was time for my mother to move into an apartment at the facility that runs my father’s nursing home.   So here I am in Kansas City, trying to help arrange the emptying of the five-bedroom house where I lived back in high school, and where my parents have lived ever since.