Solstice and Perry

Every winter Solstice, my family gathers in the living room by the lit fireplace and eats cookies, receives an ornament, and writes poetry about the year gone by. It's nice, rather quaint tradition, and according to my mother it originated when I was little, because right before Christmas is when toddlers start to go a little bonkers. Solstice is a nice quiet holiday to calm down. My little brother wrote short three-lined poems with the last lines as questions, my little sister did an acrostic and writing couplets, my mother wrote an eerie winter poem, I wrote poems about the Amnesty Inc. pen that I kept breaking and our tree angel, and my dad wrote a narrative poem about how he gave $20 dollars to a needy man with the requirement that he spend it on his infant son, and then later saw him buying diapers. We each received an ornament and enjoyed s'mores.

Then, Wednesday morning, I called the cats for breakfast and Perry didn't come. I finally found him in his hut by the window, but he showed no interest in eating. He vomited several times and meowed whenever anyone tried to pick him up, so my parents took him to the vet. The vets thought he had swallowed thread or floss, so my dad drove him to a specialty vet an hour or so away. Then we went through our usual business, watching the telly, trying to write this blog post (it's been three days), and cleaning. (My room currently leaves much to be desired.) So they went into surgery, opened up his stomach, and lo and behold. . . PERRY HAS A HOLE IN HIS INTESTINAL WALL! It was something he was born with, but that did nothing to prevent my mother from removing all the tinsel and obsessively picking up fragments. All in good reason, of course. Perry is recuperating and is expected home today--we hope. If not, we go visit him with chicken baby food.

Happy Holidays!