Learning to Pray on Hawk's Hill

When we first arrived on Hawk's Hill, our solar house, Soulstice, was still being imagined.  The drawings on graph paper housed our hopes; our family dwelled in a single-wide house trailer of about 600 square feet in floor space.  Four people, a 100-pound yellow Lab, and the old kitty we brought from Ohio squeezed into that narrow ship of a home. 

One day, our old city cat lay down in the dappled shade of the woods behind the trailer and passed away.   After I buried her among the Lady Ferns, after we had cried over her loss, after we accepted living catless -- for who could in good conscience invite a kitten into the crush of that single wide trailer-- we all quietly began to pray for a new cat to come into our lives.  

No, I don't mean the child-like kneeling at the bedside or the disciplined praying down a list of names.   We prayed the deep longing of those who are hungry, who look upon friends living with cats as charmed as fairy princesses.  We prayed with the desire of those who stop into the feed & seed and kneel before the new calico mouser, captivated, transported, forgetting their place in time and the list of needed items, lost in petting a warm, purring three-pound feline.  

The hospitality of cat-owning friends who invited us to dinner felt magnified by the presence of a cat or two to stroke and scratch under the chin.  We daydreamed of stretching on our comfy sofa with a book and a cat alongside or curled in a lap.  Glancing a cat food ad, I wished I were lucky as the lady on the TV getting a nose-tip greeting from her cat.  We prayed hopeful, humble prayers of longing. A year went by, and two.  We focused on working the soil, building the house.

April brought the rush of planting peas, potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, and onions in the garden, the fatigue of bodies stretched out of a sedentary winter in the trailer and glad to be back upon the land.  We fell into bed at night, happily weary.  One midnight, awakened by our barking dog, we let him out to chase a raccoon off the front porch.  September sometimes brought raccoons snuffling bushel baskets of apples that sat awaiting the sauce pot and mason jars, but in April we only hope for such bounty.  Groggily, David peered out the window to the walnut tree where his gaze was met not by a raccoon, but a gray and white cat.  He snapped a digital photo and in the morning, we admired the grainy image of a little kitty up our tree, chagrined that we had let our dog chase her away.

We watched hopefully, but did not see her the next day.  Later in the week, our dog chased her up another tree while I tended our laying flock.  I stood at the foot of the tree and apologized to the little cat, leaving a broken-up dog treat from my pocket as recompense for my galloping galoot of a dog and hauling him away.  I soon began to leave cat kibble and a bowl of water in the barn hopefully.

One morning before David and I had to leave the farm for a school conference, I stopped at the barn to retrieve a cardboard tube for a Sunday school game.  I never made it up to the barn loft for my prop, for between my booted feet that soft-furred cat wove herself, leaning, purring affectionately.  I petted her for as long as I had time, and could scarcely walk away, so hungry was this cat for attention.  I was afraid I'd step on her, she stuck to me like a shadow.  David and I departed the farm with the grateful knowledge that our prayers had been answered, and that our kids would come home from school to a new cat.  

Our oldest daughter, Sarah, would name that moxie cat, Boo, for the way she appeared out of nowhere.  The vet down the Lincoln Highway would tell me my skinny little friend was about 9 months old, still a kitten, though out on her own.

Boo

As I write, that hungry, grateful kitty lays stretched at my feet, snoozing away the snowstorm that curtains our farm, a living, purring answer to prayer.  Another gray and white cat, her grown kitten, lays curled on the soft carpet under my desk, and out in the hallway, a dinged up wooden bowl holds the sleek, black ninja form of her other napping son.  Yes, the night before I trellised the peas, that little moxie cat gave birth to two healthy kittens in our barn loft art studio. For, when you pray as hard as we all prayed those trailer days, you may find yourself in the lucky position of receiving a bounty beyond your wildest reckoning.  

The boys in my apron pockets.

  I tell these stories to remind myself of the way to pray.  Not checking lists, not feeding prayers like quarters into a vending machine, but with heart, persistence and humility.

May you receive bountiful answers to your deepest prayers,
Betsy