Friday, June 12, 2009

Home sweet empty(ish) home

We got home today from our Colorado vacation. Maybe my brain is still on mountain time because I am still up, although I am pretty exhausted.

Our trip was good. We decided to go on the trip to celebrate our sixth year of wedded bliss, and it was a decently good time. I'll write about that another time, though.

Last Saturday morning—the day we were scheduled to leave for the first leg of our westbound trip—we awoke to an awful discovery. Obie, our sweet/quirky/wonderful/inquisitive/one-of-a-kind/preposterously ridiculous cat of six years had died during the night. He appeared to have died in his sleep. We're grateful that it was apparently painless, but the suddenness and unexpectedness of it shocked us with a force that was felt throughout our trip and felt with a different kind of force this evening when we arrived home to the soft mew of only Cosette (our formerly timid and mostly hidden cat, now endowed with a new boldness, or maybe just a curious confusion about being suddenly left totally alone in the house for almost a full week).

We miss him terribly. I find myself in tears at the silliest moments--opening a can of tuna this evening, realizing that I only needed to drain the "tuna juice" (which had been so greedily coveted by Obie, but shyly eyeballed by Cosette, who was able to enjoy her portion only until Obie's was gone and he bullied his way over to her bowl. Jeez, just the sound of the can opener would bring his 20+-lb frame sprinting from any corner of the house within seconds if he thought the delectable taste of tuna juice was coming) into one dish tonight.

Anyway. Now that we're home, it's starting to sink in a little, but the freshness of this new loss hung over our trip like a wet cloud, and we arrived home this afternoon exhausted in more than one way.

We'll miss you, "little" Obie. You've been as much a fixture of the past six years of our marriage as anything else, and we loved you. We're grateful for the laughter and absurdity you brought to our life, and I have a feeling we'll be telling Obie stories for a really long time.