Hermit Crab

     Super stressed, I woke up in the middle of the night.  While my hands, on autopilot, started opening cans for the cats who think that they must be fed immediately whenever I wake up, my mind was focused on the image I woke up with – a seashell.  Not just a random shell, but one that had housed a hermit crab.  On their own, hermit crabs are not pretty animals—they look similar to other kinds of crabs.  But hermit crabs are nature’s recyclers – they live their lives in shells discarded by other creatures, carrying the shell with them as they move like a part of them.

As I focused on the image, the hazy wisps of a dream took shape in my memory.  In the dream, I am the crab, detaching from my constraining shell and leaving it abandoned on the beach. Still not fully awake, I thought to myself that the shell is my life with all its stress and sadness- the impossible to pay bills, the physical pain, the falling down house, the bullshit at work-and the thought of leaving it behind feels so freeing.

“You’ve worked too hard to walk away,” Micah said yesterday.  He meant my job, not my life, but I can’t have one without the other.  Earlier in the week, a friend who never had to give money a second thought, suggested that I retire to Gloucester and for a minute my mind filled with the intense green of the back lawn in the summer.  It was too much to explain to him that like so many Americans I will never be able to retire, so I just pointed out that living in Gloucester doesn’t work that well for those of us who don’t drive.

Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t notice that the cats had finished eating and washed themselves until I felt the touch of slightly damp fur on my arm.  One of the other cats had over-washed Connor, leaving him with some wet spots, and now he was ready to snuggle.  Connor was born in my house – I took in his shy tortoiseshell mother and she went behind the piano and had four orange boys.  I had wanted an orange cat for years, but the thing about rescue is that you get what you get.  Since they were born behind the piano, we had no idea how many kittens or what colors until they got big enough to wobble out on their own.  Connor was the first one out – in those days before they had names, we called him “brave kitty.”  Brave kitty is actually pretty shy – since he only knew me and Kate, he still disappears completely if other people are around, leaving just a layer of orange fur on the sheets as evidence of his existence.

Patting Connor, I thought about how shy he is, how he hid even from me when we were staying in Kensington, and I knew I can’t walk away from him.  He’s an older cat, the last one who was here when Kate was alive, and he has had small cell lymphoma for over a year, so he won’t be here forever, I told myself, I just have to stick around a little bit longer.