Erin Passons's Blog

I went back home to Mississippi the week I turned forty-six. Rode back with my dad and stepmom when they came to visit Austin. Spent most of the time asleep in the backseat due to not taking my ADD meds. Woke up occasionally to see the trees change from cedar to pine, the landscape morphing from dry hot savannah to rolling plains and piney woods.

A lot has happened over the summer and going back to Mississippi, where the world is not as loud and everything moves slower, seemed like the best way to process it.

I’ve learned since getting engaged that I’m far more excited about being engaged than getting married. First of all, it’s expensive. Like, I get everyone must make a living, but holy shit. Secondly, every time I try to make a guest list, I realize that I know way too many people but have way too few friends.

But I am committed to getting married soonish even if we gotta do it at the Whataburger off I-35, me in the one dress that still fits me and Doug in one of his raggedy t-shirts with the holes under the armpits, while friends serve out French fries as hors d'oeuvres as the stereo system spits out whatever god awful audio vomit happens to be in the Top 20 that week.

My parents are getting older, you see, …and well, I think that’s what’s really been on my mind lately. Two years ago, I was learning calligraphy and I wrote, “My cat is dead and my kids are getting older” and stuck it on my fridge. Then I forgot about it until a friend came over and one saw it. “That’s the saddest thing that I’ve ever read,” he said. 

If I still had my calligraphy pen today, I’d write, “My parents are getting older and my kids have flown the coop.”

My therapist says I’m transferring the grief over my empty nest to the perceived imminent loss of my parents, and she may be right, but she also hasn’t seen me repeat that same thing fifty times to my mother, who refuses to get a hearing aid, or watch my dad pass out the minute his jorts hit the couch (Dad: “Oh boy, what a day.” Me: “Dad, it’s ten in the morning.”)

My mom and I have talked about it, just because I’ve realized that both of them seem to be going to funerals every weekend. They announce their plans casually as if they were going to a Sunday matinee. (“Yeah, I gotta run by the bank and the post office then swing by Lakewood Funeral Home, do you need anything at Walgreens?”) It’s at the point where they know more people who are dead than alive, which is reassuring to my mother, who said, “If there’s an afterlife, I’m gonna have one helluva welcome party, and if there’s not, well I won’t know, will I? I’ll have ceased to exist.”

So I spent the next two weeks, when I wasn’t working, in bed or on the couch, at times at rest, other times crying. My parents kept asking if I wanted to go anywhere. I said no. I just wanted to be around them, even if we weren’t doing anything. Even when we weren’t in the same room. I wanted to wake up to the smell of my mother’s banana bread. Witness my dad and stepmom spend half an hour deciding what to watch on TV before passing out five minutes into their final decision. Listen as their four grandfather clocks chimed at the top of each hour, sounding off like an offkey orchestra. I wanted to stand outside my mother’s back porch after a rainy night and watch the hummingbirds at the feeder, the squirrels jumping from tree to tree, the cardinals fly in and out through the azaleas. I wanted the Natchez Trace to envelope me in its secrets, the magnolia trees to wrap their long branches around me, their fragrant blooms overtaking my senses, filling me with sweet nostalgia. When my parents pass, I will never return to Mississippi. All I have is what I had, the present already a memory. 

But just because I won’t be going back to Mississippi doesn’t mean I’m staying in Texas. That, too, is coming to an end. It’s something that gives me hope while simultaneously crushing me. 

Do we even exist when everyone we love is gone or going, and with them, the places that cradle you in their memories? These are the thoughts that I’m wrestling with on my 46th year around the sun.

Someone has placed plastic flowers on the grave

Of a baby who died 143 years ago

The petals are yellow and wet with morning dew.


In the distance a hurt animal cries and the leaves dance

to its misery, while the sunlight pokes through its prison of clouds,

Saying Shh this is nature’s reckoning.


Inside the church, my son is holding a sermon to himself

My daughter is playing the piano and singing softly,

More prayer than song,

The battleground she’s made of her body swaying with each note.


Hope floats through the dogwood air

and hits the pews below and the archways above.

I have seen the Notre Dame and its replica in Montreal

I have seen the Taj Mahal in its symmetrical splendor

But I have never felt closer to God than now.

 

My Cat is Dead and My Kids aregetting Older

 

Kojiwas killed Tuesday night. I knew something wrong when he didn’t come home. Itold Doug about it on Wednesday. He said not to worry. Koji had gone missingbefore. “Don’t spiral,” he said, which was his go-to statement whenever I broughthim my concerns. It throws me off a little. I never thought of myself as aspiraler. But maybe I was a little melodramatic around Doug, because I knew Icould be.

Dougis usually right about stuff so I stopped worrying. But then Thursday rolledaround and there was still no sign of him. I posted his photo on ourneighborhood Facebook group. The photo is a closeup where you can see Koji’s kaleidoscopeeyes, the sprinkles of aqua mixed with the standard cat green. He lookedannoyed, but that was Koji. Indignant since the day that London found him onthe sidewalk. “He just came out of nowhere,” she said. He was so direct andfamiliar right off the bat, we were sure he belonged to someone. We asked around,but no one claimed him.

Dougwas adamant that we find another home for him. “We’re not having a seventh cat.”But cats are smarter than people think. Koji must have sensed Doug’s reluctancebecause the long-bodied tabby with the strange eyes and crooked feet went towork right away on the man of the house, rubbing against him whenever possibleand sitting in his lap at any opportune time. Always following him around thehouse, always chatting to him. “This is the loudest ass cat,” Doug would say, nolonger trying to disguise his affection. Annoyance turned to resignation, then love,and within days, we stopped looking for a new home for Koji and Doug stoppedasking if we had found one. If we had, I don’t think Doug would have let himleave.

SoKoji became part of the family, taking up shop in the scratching post designedto look like a cactus, hanging out in the garage on the old patio cushions,sleeping wedged in between Doug and me at night, filling up the space left vacantsince Sketch died a year earlier, soothing a wound that had never fully healed.The other cats accepted him pretty easily too. Well, except for Morrison, butthat was to be expected. The female tortie, who is also (un)affectionatelyknown as the Babadook, the Crazy Bitch, and Demonic Psycho Cat from Hell, hadspent the last year terrorizing Finn – the tuxedo we adopted when Sketch died –and smacking around the feral brothers who lived outside under our deck. Kojiwas just another interloper in a house full of interlopers to add to her shitlist. But unlike Finn, Koji didn’t take her aggression sitting down. He gave asgood as he got, smacking her across the eyes when she got too close, meetingher growl with one of his own. Witnessing Koji’s bravery gave Finn theconfidence to stand up to her too. These days Morrison stays in our bedroom, curledinto a little ball of hate on our duvet, only puffing up when one of the boysdared to cross the invisible boundary into her domain.

Aboutan hour after I posted the photo of Koji, a neighbor messaged me. He said his fiancésaw the body of a dead cat in the nature reserve. It had Koji’s markings. Myheart sank. “Do you know where in the nature reserve, exactly?” I wrote back,but I didn’t wait for a reply. I threw a bottle of water and some grocery bagsinto a backpack. Doug was sleeping off his long car ride back from San Antonioand I thought for a moment not to wake him, then figured, he probably wanted togo with me. And he did. He shot right out of bed and slid into his sneakers. Itwas just after three pm and still triple digits outside but we were on amission. Maybe the cat that our neighbor had seen was Koji. Maybe it wasn’t.But one thing was for certain, if it was our baby boy, then we were bringinghim home.

 We split up just outside of the local artist’shouse, at the entrance to the reserve where the trail forks. I went left andDoug went right. I must have scanned every square inch of the reserve, searchingfor death in a landscape painted in death, a massacre of dried grass and brownedplant, casualties of the driest, hottest summer on record. At times I caughtthe stench of decomposition in the air, but it left as soon it came. I knew fromthe time that a possum died under our porch, that where bodies laid to rest, fliesfollowed shortly after, but I saw none of those either, and I wished vaguelythat I had a dog or the senses of a dog to investigate better. At one point I thoughtperhaps I had psychic abilities that I didn’t know about, and I closed my eyesand raised my arms and waited for the weight of intuition to carry me in theright direction.

Finally,I called for him. Koji, Koji, Koji. Maybe he was in the reserve,but not as the dead animal my neighbor had seen, but a living thing, stuck upin a tree or hiding in a bush, still frightened but recovering  from a close brush with god-knows-what(probably a coyote).

Butwhat’s that saying? Hope is a violent thing. Hope can drive a man insane.It’s even crueler to women.

Aftertwo hours, we gave up.

Afterwe got home, the neighbor responded. He said his fiancé didn’t remember whereshe had seen him exactly but she had taken a photo. He sent it to me. It wasjust a paw sticking out over the dried grass. I imagined there was more to see,but he had cropped it out of mercy. I showed Doug. “Can you compare this with aphoto of Koji?” Doug has a million photos of Koji. I wandered away and sat onthe couch and pretended to read. After a while, Doug called me back into hisoffice. I walked back there and he looked up from his phone with tears poolingaround his eyes. He nodded slowly. I felt my chest caving in. I managed to makeit to my bedroom before collapsing into a pile of grief.  

Londoncame home from school and I told her and we cried in her room. We arrived atthe same conclusion separately not to tell Kaya, at least not right away, sincehe was going back to school and we didn’t want to ruin his shining moment.Honestly, we may never tell him, because he may never ask. I make fun of himsometimes, but secretly, I’m jealous of his ability to stay completely andutterly detached. God, how wonderful would it be to care about nothing but myself?Dear Santa, I’ve been a good girl, may I have self-absorption for Christmas? Pleaseand thanks.

Anyway,I didn’t feel like announcing Koji’s death on Facebook or telling anyone.Frankly, I’m tired of my own pity party. Kaya left today, so there’s that. Alreadyposted about it. Already have 80 plus “care” reactions. I don’t feel like pinningan addendum, “oh and by the way my cat was killed.” Welp, everyone look at me. SadErin. My cat is dead and my kids are getting older.

Yeah,no thanks.

Ididn’t even tell anyone at work either, which means I got to spend the day mutedin meetings while sobbing into a cold mug of Earl Gray. Answering any requeststhat came my way with the enthusiasm of someone who didn’t lose the most beautifuland precious creature on earth. “Erin, can you create this dashboard?” Ofcourse I can, yes sir. Milestones, deliverables, my cat is dead, my cat isdead. The deadline is Tuesday. Koji will have been dead a week by then.God, I hate time. How it ticks on. But let’s talk about dashboards, why thehell not.

Sidenote:I hope whatever attacked Koji chokes on his fucking bones. I know it’s natureand every living thing has to eat but I hope whatever predator (probably a coyote)attacked my baby boy gets rickets from the meat and dies in open grass gaspingfor breath until its loathsome heart ceases to beat. I hope Koji reincarnatesinto a buzzard and eats it right back.

Okay,maybe Doug is right. Maybe I am a spiraler.

Andmaybe I do need to talk about Koji. I need to tell someone what a great a cathe was, what a gift. I don’t want him to be forgotten.

Iwish it was you that I was telling this to, but we don’t talk anymore. I don’t knowwhy and I’m done trying to guess. So I’m writing this here, hoping one day you’llread this and take pity and reach out. Knowing you, you’ll probably drop me aline, pretending like nothing happened. Like these last six months when youbecame a ghost (why didn’t you wish me a happy birthday?) never happened. I’ll probablynever know why you ghosted me in the first place. And I’ll never ask youeither. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I care too much. I miss you and Imiss Koji and how can I be 45 years old and still not understand how toappreciate what I have while I have it? Why do I take everything for granted?It’s not like I’m getting any younger. I’m getting older. And I’m dying. Justlike everyone else.

Nowback to crying and those damn dashboards.

(Ilove you, Koji. I will never forget you. Thank you for the smiles, thelaughter, the tears. I love you, I love you, I love you.)

 

 

She didn’t think about the location.
Just that it paid $15 an hour
And she needed money.
The next step to freedom.
She didn’t think about the mean girls
Who drove her out of school
into the arms of an eating disorder

Or the ravaged friendships of her youth
coming home from college
seeing her behind the counter,
stitched together by every antidepressant modern medicine has to offer.

I had to remind her, “west lake? Are you sure? You may see someone…”

She began to cry.

So I forego the usual parental wisdom: “Be on time, be respectful, work hard.”

Instead, “it’s just a fucking job. If it gets too hard, you can find another.”

But I, too, am worried.

so I wait outside.

I’ll be waiting outside for the next four hours.

praying no one remembers her,
or if they do,
that they remember her fondly
Friends, no foes.
A joyous reunion.

Or at least -

that the queen bees and gangly teens leave behind only grease from the chickens slaughtered

and the world moves on as it should

without hurting my daughter.
- E.P.12 - 17 - 2022

I won't say that I picked the father of my children based on his math skills, but it didn't hurt. 

I had hoped when the time came for us to have children, that the colorless world my ex-husband inhabited - one of fractions and solid lines, of clear formulas and perfect 90 degree angles - would somehow drown out my own - that of vibrant shapes undefined and blanks scraps of paper, of unpublished rhyme and wasted potential. 

Yes, wasted potential, because too often there is a flag of surrender behind the beautiful chaos of the artistic mind. I knew this personally. 

But through the monochromatic eyes of my ex-husband, I saw what success and accomplishment looked like when it was untouched by the need to feed an insatiable, invisible hunger. I sensed the satisfaction of the straight and narrow, witnessed how wide the world opened with endless possibilities when looked upon by one with limited vision. 

In short, I learned: the world is less crueler to the left-brained. 

And this, I wanted for my children - even if it meant they would never see an object through multiple lenses or experience the sheer ecstasy from creating something into existence. 

At least they would always know where their next paycheck was coming from. Feel the satisfaction of completing a day pre-outlined by an Outlook calendar or a slide deck agenda. Blend easily into the pattern of things, a black and white life unhindered by need or desire.

But that didn't happen, despite my ex-husband and my best intentions. Despite the math camps, the afternoons teaching them the chemical makeup of deoxyribonucleic acid and the beauty to be found in decomposition and fusion. In the end, my chaos prevailed. 

My daughter was a foregone conclusion almost immediately. She began singing when she was four-years-old, breaking into a Little Mermaid song by the fireplace, her voice a perfect vibrato. By the time she was thirteen, she was playing piano and writing songs on the ukulele. 

There was still hope for my son, however. Just having that Y chromosome gave him a leg up, or so I thought. But in the third grade, he came home with a first-place certificate. He had won a school-wide art content, one that I hadn't known he entered. I clipped the certificate to the refrigerator and wept for days. (When I look back, I should have seen it coming. One of his first words was "colorful.") After awhile, I put my big girl pants on and said no matter what, I would support him. It would take years before I learned to encourage him.

So, Kaya, here we are. 

I'm doubtful that you will ever read this because you don't read anything. I didn't pass on my love of books to you, although I hope one day you will learn to appreciate what words can do as much you have embraced the universe of color. After all, people can change - a fact that I am just now learning (see below).

I'm proud of you. I really am. I'm proud of your talent, and I'm proud of your dedication and desire. I want you to know that whatever happens, just having determination alone is your door. You don't need Interlochen. You don't need the Art Institute of Chicago or that place in New York that we can never remember the name of. You have a natural gift and the willpower to move ahead. No one can give you that. No one can teach you that. 

Kaya at Interlochen, August 8, 2022

But you must stay steadfast. 

Art is a blood sport. But worse than any other sport, you are not competing against other people. You are competing against yourself. The greatest minds of my generation - the greatest artists, writers, and musicians - sell insurance or work in department stores for a living. I don't mean to be condescending. Most jobs are noble simply by their existence (someone has to do it), but still - what a waste. The only reason I - with my meager accomplishments - achieved any modicum of success was because I wanted it more than they did. Every rejection letter, every door slammed, every well-meaning friend or family member telling me to quit, be happy with what I have - I took that as a sign that I needed to work harder. So I did. And so must you.

On the way back to the car yesterday, you accused me of putting people in boxes. You said I create a composite sketch in my mind and I stick to it. I don't allow people to grow. 

I appreciated your honesty. And you're right. It's one of my biggest character flaws, and probably one of my biggest faults as a writer. When you're writing a book, you have to give your characters a chance to evolve and change. Otherwise, there's no story. 

So, I want you to know, I'm dedicated to changing my ways, and I'm dedicated to your story, knowing full well that I am not the maestro behind the keyboard this time. I am just a bystander. Your journey is your own, and I am just another reader, and that is okay. I will remain engrossed with your plot, holding my breath for every twist and turn, and cheering you on until the final page. 

You are the author of your own story, and I love every word you haven't yet written.

Keep going.

 

I just don't have the words yet.  

My boyfriend talked to our cat each morning.

It used to drive me nuts. 

I would be at my desk working

a mess of heliographs 

untangling words to make sense

then I would hear baby talk across the room

my concentration snapped and so would I

"Can't you talk somewhere else?"

Now the cat is dead

and my boyfriend has no one to talk to

It is lonely to live with me

I have been told

Not just by him

But other men

And my children I suspect

Also sense the fruitlessness

of speech when mommy

has donned her writer's mask.

It is a chore to live with me, 

I guess

My daughter slammed the door on death
when he came calling last spring

But even before and definitely since,
she has flirted with his traitor’s kiss.
how sweet the relief, a promise kept,
packaged in a final breath.

So we delivered her on metal wings
where mountains sing and mud the sky,
where fields glow amber and trees bleed fire,
the beauty of a summer dying.

The three goddesses of the moon -
the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone -
met our shadows on the track.
Familiar faces from the past,
they snipped the cord on her first night.
“love is a sacrifice,” they cried.

I always knew they would come back.

“the thirtieth, the fifteenth
and the first,” they cooed, “play the tune that leads her path.”

So when the waxen sphere at last
Hung low above the mile-high room
My daughter took the wheel so fast
and left me childless in a lonely noon

what I have saved -

a wounded squirrel on the side of the road

baby birds from the claws of cats

many lizards (again, from cats)

a frightened possum all alone

orphaned kittens without a home

co-workers from a tyrant's snare

a childhood acquaintance from a life not worth living. 

what I have harmed - 

my daughter

For Charlotte

“I have been to Abilene
The spirit world rising
I have seen in Abilene
The Devil has Texas.”
—Daniel Johnston
TenderfootI call my boyfriend, Doug, a tenderfoot because he’s all white-collar, despite being a Mississippian born and bred. Years spent roaming concrete jungles, first as a journalist and then as a lawyer, has gradually chipped away at his country upbringing, souring him to soil. By the time I got to him, he had forgotten how to labor manually in the world.
I don’t know if it was moving to Texas or becoming a homeowner that eventually reignited Doug’s blue collar/laborer spirit. Probably a little both. In Texas, you must be prepared for every malevolence Mother Nature throws at you. Wildfires, cedar trees, all the venomous snakes that you can shake a stick at. Even our pretty flowers like bull nettles can kill you or maim you for life.
Also, of course, are the thunderstorms and hurricanes. Sure, our large patch of semi-desert hell on earth is dry most of the year. But when it’s not, it’s not.
Two years ago, when Hurricane Harvey hit, our backyard flooded and drowned a pregnant cat queening under our porch. With a neighbor’s help, Doug dug a hole beneath the wooden planks to retrieve the body. “Don’t come outside,” he warned me.
Shortly after, Doug came around to playing farmer. Growing peppers, specifically. I will never understand what makes men want to eat something that burns their mouths on the way in and lights up their rear ends on the way out, but Doug loves them and grew quite a selection in the old bookshelves that we had laid flat and repurposed as vegetable gardens: Anaheim, bell, Jalapeno, Serrano, Poblano. As late as early February, we still had some blooming at the stem, eager for longer daylight hours and a chance to be reborn.
Then, a week before President’s Day, winter storm warnings began flooding the airwaves. We didn’t really pay attention. Doug’s snarky comment, “There’s an eighty-percent chance of snow Sunday night, which means we’re getting nothing,” was met with my laughter. We took great joy reveling in the weatherman’s occupational ineptitude.
Oh, hindsight.Proof“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.”

I think of this Watership Down quote as I corral the feral cats that live in my backyard into my house for the night. Our other backyard resident, a teenage raccoon we’ve named Skinny Pete, follows closely behind them. I slide the door shut before Skinny Pete has a chance to step inside. Dejected, he paws at the door, his fluffy, banded face pressing into the glass. Light from the kitchen reflects the desperation in his eyes. He knows, he knows. My heart cracks. “What if..?” I begin.
“No,” Doug says curtly behind me. He may have embraced his inner pioneer, but potentially rabid, wild animals, he drew a line at.
Sickness & DarknessI wake on the morning of President’s Day with an achy throat, swollen limbs, my nose clogged as if an invisible Kleenex has been stuffed into its cavities.
I lean over and turn on the lamp. Only, nothing happens. I make a mental note to replace the bulb, then attempt to flick on another light. Still, nothing.
Then it hits me, and I groan.
“What is it?” Doug asks groggily from the bed.
“The electricity is out.” I pause, and add, “Also, I think I have COVID.”
Tenderfoot No MoreOn a vacation to Wyoming last fall, Doug decided to push his winter-driving skills to the limits. He rented a four-wheel drive—a big bulky number that only Bubba-types drove back home—and headed off to elevated grounds. It was dodgy at first, but he got the hang of it.

On President’s Day, my former tenderfoot’s new winter driving skills becomes a life saver when we realize our power would stay out for a while. Earlier, Austin Energy had tweeted, “Per ERCOT, controlled outages will likely last through tonight + into Tuesday as ERCOT works to restore the electric system to normal operations.” Translation: “Y’all are shit out of luck.”

So, Doug and I decide to head out into the wild, blue yonder and bag some supplies for the rough days ahead—even if scoring said goods would be a crap shoot. We have no way of knowing if anything was open. By this point, our cell service is shoddy, the network overloaded because everyone else’s internet is down; half of Austin is using cell data too. The only option is to drive by and see.
The Unfamiliar FamiliarMy first impression of our winter-stormed city: it’s still Austin and yet it isn’t.

Gone is the clear, blue sky and yellow sun; gone are the sun-soaked buildings framed by dried landscapes and backdropped in pigments of a perpetual summer.

Instead, muddy, gray clouds smear the sky. Snow and ice pack the sidewalks. Snow caps the tops of cactuses and twentieth-century plants, ice coat their prickled skins and long, while sharp icicles line the trim of snow-coated rooftops and corners of street signs.

The roads are mostly empty, chafed in places by the odd tire tracks stenciling mud into the snow, and Doug finds driving easy. “Everything is easy, after Wyoming,” he says.

We drive past pedestrians in wool caps and heavy coats lingering at street corners below downed traffic lights, and parking lots dotted with parents helping their children ball up snow, our eyes searching for lit Open signs that do not exist. Everywhere is closed—the gas stations, the dollar stores, the grocery stores.

We are about to give up when I remember the Target on Frontage Road, north of Brodie Lane. One of my favorite Sunday Funday hangouts under normal circumstances. I don’t know if it’s open, but some internal, white woman instinct told me that it is.
A Map of the WorldHonestly, I don’t know which is scarier—living without heat in freezing temperatures, or sending a man into Target by himself. In ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t have to choose either. But today is not ideal, and I have no choice. I have COVID. I can’t go inside. Doug will have to shop solo.

Doug isn’t thrilled about being the designated shopper either. I mean, we’re talking about a man who hasn’t been inside a brick and mortar store in seven years, thanks to a girlfriend who loves him and the miracle of Instacart. I help ease his anxiety by drawing a map on a napkin, listing what we need and where he can find it. Batteries, Aisle Nine. Flashlights, Aisle Thirty-Two. Candles and lighters, Aisle Twenty-Three. And so on.

Doug stumbles out of the car and into the parking lot like an unseasoned soldier storming the beaches of Normandy. But to his credit, he comes back an hour later with everything but the milk. “They aren’t selling produce,” he says. “They’ve taped the fridge and freezer doors shut.” He says inside is spooky, Armageddon-like. He describes the eerily half-stocked aisles with dimmed lighting (electricity had gone out there too; they were using generators). Only self-checkout counters are open, and the line to check out went down the shampoo aisle. In the bottled water aisle, which had been picked over by early shoppers, a woman had been crying.

We’re about to leave the parking lot when an SUV squeals by us and hydroplanes into the curb. Another car cannonballs into its side, ice flying, smoke puffing miserably from the exhaust pipes. The two drivers hop out unharmed, and Doug waits until he knows they’ve worked it out before pulling out onto Frontage Road. “Thank you, Wyoming, thank you,” he keeps repeating, over and over until we are almost home.

At the corner of our street, we notice our neighbor in her front yard, standing beside a tent where she sells plants. She’s wearing old sweatpants and wool boots shoes and is cradling a small, dead houseplant, its brown, wilted vines dancing in the wind. Doug puts his mask on and stops to see if she needs help. She says no but thank you, she’s just sad and surveying her losses. She’s lost $30,000 worth of plants. The blackout knocked out her greenhouse and took the plants with it. Her boyfriend, Neil—our neighborhood handyman and a good friend of Doug’s—walks outside and gives Doug a terracotta pot for turning into a small heater, like we had seen on social media. Neil tells us to keep it as long as we need it. He looks down at the dead plant in his girlfriend’s hands and adds, “We can do without it for a while.”

Neil and his girlfriend’s plight sobers our mood, and we stay silent rolling into our driveway. We park, grab our spoils and carefully head inside, sidestepping chunks of ice. Although it’s only six o'clock, it’s already dark, and the darkness, made thicker by the cold, blurs every detail with its ragged veils.

Once inside, a kind of manic urgency takes over us. The Weather Channel said it would be ten degrees tonight, and this time, Doug and I believe them.
When the Long Night Falls
I create a tiny heater out of the terracotta pot and twelve tea candles. Doug collects blankets around the house and lays them on the couches in the living room—the most central room in the house and our designated bedroom until the heat comes back on. We push the couches close together. Doug cooks soup using a hand lighter to light our gas stove while I read my slow-loading Twitter feed on my phone: rolling blackouts that weren’t rolling, seconds and minutes away from a months-long blackout, ERCOT unable to turn on electricity at this time. Republicans predictably blaming green energy. Liberals predictably blaming Republicans. Outrage over affluent neighborhoods bearing the smallest outage burden. Austin Energy asking its residents with electricity to use it sparingly (Echoing my thoughts, one person responded, “People with electricity aren’t reading this shit. They’re sitting in a warm house watching Bridgerton on Netflix.”)

After dinner, I make chamomile tea with honey for my COVID throat. On the way back from the kitchen, I focus my flashlight on the back porch, where Skinny Pete is notably absent. It was concerning; this was usually the hour he begged for scraps.

“He’s a wild animal, he’s used to the cold,” Doug reminds me.

“Not this kind of cold,” I mutter.

We snuggle into our ten layers of blankets and twenty layers of cats. I’m drifting into sleep, dreaming about microwaved popcorn, when Doug brings up an excellent point, “At least London and Kaya aren’t with us.”

Usually not having my kids is a bad thing, but this time, I couldn’t agree more. The kids are spending the week at their dad’s house in West Lake—a rich suburb in northwest Austin. Their electricity is on, as is the case with most affluent areas in Texas (per Twitter). Social justice warriors are having a field day about it—as was I—but the mom in me couldn’t help but feel grateful my kids were safe and warm.

Exhausted from the war going on with my white blood cells, I go to sleep immediately, and stay sleeping until early dawn.Spirit World RisingI wake slowly. From the window, I see a slit of sun appearing in the east, staining the dark sky pink and speckling the wisps of cloud with stolen gold.

A cat cries above me. Charlotte, our senior tabby, our Lady Lazarus. Eighteen-years-old this month, and won’t make it to nineteen, if her current condition is an indicator. She’s already scared us multiple times. The vet wanted to put her down last month, but we declined. “She’s eating and drinking,” I had argued. And she still appears to enjoy life—at least, as much as a cat enjoys anything.

Charlotte had been curled on top of me all night—the brittle bones of her, the paper thin skin and unkept fur sticking to the spiked arches of her spine, her snarled paws with the perpetually detracted claws striving to find a hold on top of my blue nylon jacket, with its slick surface thwarting her at every turn. Her purr is not so much a purr but an elongated sigh, and emitting from the rest of her are the strangest sounds, like the whistle of air slowly being sucked out from a balloon, or the creak from an old house under the slightest breeze, or the receding motor of a wind-up toy winding down, winding down, winding all the way down. Her eyes are saucers, her pupils are dark mini-planets within green-gold galaxies. She looks tired. And hungry. “Is it snack time, Charlotte?” I try to move, but everything hurts. Overnight, a burning, wet cold had crawled inside me, seeping into my bones.

I stand up shakily and note that towels have been spread out across the couches. “I put the towels over the cats,” Doug explained to me later. “They looked so cold.”Other States “I can’t believe what is happening over there. Texas is a mess,” my dad says over the phone. “You wouldn’t be without electricity if you were back in Mississippi.”

My dad is always trying to sell Mississippi to me, even though I hadn’t lived there in twenty-five years and have no plans to return. If a Metro bus ran over me on Congress Avenue and crushed my guts and I died, my dad would probably say at my funeral, “She wouldn’t have had her guts crushed by a bus in Mississippi.”

Overnight, my employer, a state agency, sends an email, “Please do not report to your work site and limit telework activity in order to conserve electricity.”
WafflesI’m outside in my car, charging my phone. A masked Doug is next door talking to our neighbor whose name we’ve never known. I wonder if Doug is going to pretend like he knows his name, or just come out and ask. We know his wife’s name. Angela. It’s engraved in the tag of their cat’s collar. The cat’s name is Waffles. We call him the Hustler of Fentonridge, because he’s always going around to people’s houses, begging for food, even though from what I can tell, he gets more than enough from home. We can hear him from a mile away too, thanks to his tag clanging against his collar. Oh, here comes Waffles to eat us out us of house and home. Still, we can’t help but love the little freeloader.

The neighbor is standing in his driveway, wearing Ziploc bags on his boots and shoveling ice and snow from his driveway with a steel broom-scooper-thing. I can hear him tell Doug, he’s taking his family to a friend’s house in Walnut Creek for the night. His sons are getting restless. He has two of them. The younger one has special needs and keeps to himself; the older son, I’ve had more interaction with. We buy caramel popcorn at $8 a pop when he knocks on the door, fundraising for his Boy Scout troop. He can often be seen wandering around the neighborhood, calling out for Waffles. The kid—I can’t recall his name—is like a throwback to the 1950’s. He is the type of son that I always imagined I would have if I had a son. All wide-eyed wonder and dirty knees. Not like the son I ended up with—the gamer who locks himself in his bedroom and yells out newly constructed words like “noob” and “hacker” to his equally loud and obnoxious friends on the other side of the screen, this gangly byproduct of the anti-social social media world, equal parts of exaggeration and apathy, whom I nevertheless worship and worry about and love unconditionally.

A Twitter notification pops up on my phone. Austin Energy. “Customers should be prepared to not have power through Tuesday night and possibly longer. The situation overnight could once again get worse depending on generation + energy use + weather.”

I dismiss the alert and scroll through Spotify until I find Band of Horses’ “The End’s Not Near, It’s Here.” Ben Bridwell’s tenor fills the car as I hunch forward with a hacking cough.Blackout Love in the Time of COVIDI can’t smell, so I have zero warning before I walk into the puddles of cat pee that my stressed-out cats have left around the house like booby traps. Because of the pee, and the snow that we keep tracking into the house, it’s become impossible to keep socks dry for long. I’ve used up almost every pair that we own, and am now down to Kaya’s “shark socks”—named such because they’re illustrated with the faces of sharks, which are open-mouthed and pointing upward, as if to bite off the legs of the person wearing them.

Doug joins me in the candle-lit kitchen. “Wanna make out?” I ask, pointing to the shark socks.

Doug pretends to consider. “Only if you throw in that cat shirt my mom got you for Christmas.”

“Done.”

Doug laughs. “God, I can’t wait until I can do a load of laundry.”

“Can I write that down?” I ask. Doug has, shall we say, a very well-documented commitment issue with laundry.

“No, and if you post something on Facebook, I will murder you and any of your friends who comment on it.” Doug sighs. “Is spaghetti okay?”

It has to be, I think. Food-wise, we’re running out of options.

Before I go to bed, I shine the flashlight onto the back porch. Still no sign of Skinny Pete.The Long Night Has Ended (Sort of)Doug wakes me in the middle of the night. “Do you hear that?”

I open my eyes and listen. A continuous roar is coming from the walls. The air conditioner—or heater, rather—has rejoined the living. Probably the best sound that I’ve ever heard.

My hand finds the back of Charlotte’s jagged spine. I fall back to sleep a happy camper, but Doug stays awake for hours, marveling at the sound.
Trade-OffWash dishes. Run a load of laundry. Play on the computer. Vacuum. Watch TV. Theoretically, the options are endless.

But Doug and I strive to be good citizens (most of the time, anyway). Austin Energy has asked us to conserve energy, and that’s what we’re doing. All the lights are still off, and we’ve got the thermostat set to 68.

A Twitter notification pops up on my phone. Austin Water. “There are NO plans to disrupt water service. Our plants are operating normally.”

An hour later I’m in London’s room pillaging for fresh socks when Doug walks in and announces, “The water is about to go out.”

“But Twitter just said—”

“They’re talking about it on our neighborhood Facebook page,” Doug interrupts. “They’ve already turned off water for the people two streets above us.”

As if to prove Doug’s point, the drip-drip sound of the faucets that Doug had running to keep them from freezing suddenly stops drip-dripping. Efforts to curtail the impact of not having electricity are quickly redirected to managing loss of water. We gather snow from the backyard and fill up the tub as much as we can.

A neighbor who is a retired Marine posts a picture on Facebook of what looks like the worst Tupperware party ever with the caption, “This has been our toilet tank water collection method: plastic containers and a screen door cloth for filtering large dirt/debris, buckets.” He added in the comments, “The screen works well enough to capture leaves, twigs, and small debris. Fine dirt still gets through, but it's much better than putting larger particles down your plumbing.”
Cruz to MexicoOur esteemed Senator has abandoned us. Pictures pile up on the internet. A dad-bod Ted Cruz complete with a rolling suitcase standing in line at the airport on the way to Cancun, his wife and kids surrounding him.

Meanwhile, Beto O’Rourke, the man Cruz defeated not by much in the last senatorial election, is hosting live events to get help to the elederly and other vulnerable in the community.

Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a U.S. Representative from New York, is raising money over Twitter for the millions of Texans affected by the outage. By midnight, she had raised over a million dollars.The Human CostReports of fatalities begin to roll in. An 11-year-old boy from Honduras after a day of playing in the snow. A dialysis patient in San Antonio on his way to treatment. An elderly man in Williamson County. An Abilene man after three days of no heat. Two dozen people in Harris County. All of hypothermia.

Fatalities by other causes include: winter storm-related traffic incidents, carbon monoxide poisonings, house fires.The Next DayA post from neighborhood Facebook group: “City Pressure for water is now at 30% and rising, to allow restoration. By the end of the weekend, many homes will have water; although the pressure may not be maximum. Pressure will be restored incrementally.”

By night, the water is back on. A scratchy throated memory-recording of President Ford floats my membranes, My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Fuck that, I think. We’re still in Texas, after all.You Trade Their Pain For YoursAt two in the morning, I wake up from some unknown spirit and go into the bedroom. Charlotte is on the couch, her eyes wide open, but she’s not moving. I call out her name and her eyes search for me in the darkness. I find her treats and lay down a few at her feet. She takes a bite of one, ignores the others. I lay down beside her. A moment later I hear something thud to the floor. She’s gotten up. I turn on the light. Charlotte is moving from the living room and into the hallway, which can only mean one thing. I scramble into the bathroom and grab the toilet paper.

Then I hear the cry—no, not a cry. A piercing wail.

I walk into the hallway. Charlotte has crumbled to the ground. Hard excrement dangles from under her tail, but Charlotte no longer had the muscle strength to push it out completely, or to stand and move away from it. She is paralyzed.

Her eyes ask a silent request, and I understand. Last month I had asked my Facebook friends when they knew it was time to put their cat down. One reply had stuck out to me: “You just know. You look into their eyes and you know, and you trade their pain for yours.”

You trade their pain for yours.

I gently pick her up and carry her into the bathroom, discarding her excrement into the toilet. I wrap her up in a towel. She stares at me, unblinking. Those crocodile eyes. Those eyes that stared out from a cage at a pet store and from the car window from Mississippi to Texas and from my kids’ cribs and from my lap for eighteen years. Eyes that took in every little nothing was now lost and saw nothing in everything and God, how am I going to live without her?

I wake up Doug.

“It’s time.”

The emergency clinic is ten minutes away. This is the last time she leaves the front door, I think. This is the last car ride. This is the last—

We don’t dilly dally. In the car, I cradle her in the towel and sing her a Dolly Parton song, one my mom had sung to me as a kid and her eyes are so clear, so untroubled. “You will have my lap, always, always,” I whisper.

Doug takes Charlotte inside and the vet technicians usher him into the exam room. The vet comes in shortly after and gives her two injections. One to put her to sleep. One to put her to sleep forever.

Doug stumbles out of the parking lot with a receipt and a towel, now empty. He wanders off into the street and wails. I hunch over low in the seat and let the earthquakes of grief consume me. After awhile, Doug slides back into the car and reverses into the street. Behind us, the lights of the vet clinic showcase our grief. Ahead is the dark, broken world.
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We’re driving to West Lake now, because I need to tell my kids in person. It’s seven a.m. They should be waking any minute for school. I keep calling. No one is picking up. Doug asks if I am hungry and although I am not hungry (I have never been less hungry in my life, in fact), I say sure. Because I need to see my kids and I don’t want to go back home because Charlotte is not there. I think of all the cleaning I will have to do in a house without her. After five days of no heat or water. The slimy wood floors and dishes piled up in the sink. The blankets covered in cat hair and COVID. And no Charlotte.
Doug turns into the HEB parking lot. A warm yellow sun begins to rise from above the buildings. Birds are chirping from the nearby Mexican Buckeyes. The parking lot is slick but clear of snow. The weather app says it will get up to 78 degrees today. Doug walks into HEB and comes back sometime later with tea and crackers. We eat slowly while I keep trying to call my kids. London, then Kaya, London, then Kaya until the tea is drunk and the crackers are gone and the hum from the air conditioner like a cat’s purr carries us into sleepless dreams and the earth warms around us.
—E.P., February 2021