Cats, burning candles and finding your calling...

I know it's sort of silly, but I really like burning scented candles.  For a long time I couldn't burn candles at home because of our herd of overly inquisitive cats.  I couldn't even put a candle in one of those warmers that just melts the wax to release the scent.  I came home one day to find red candle wax all over the wall and poor George's front paws encased in the stuff.  It took a while to get George clean and he wasn't happy about it.  No more candles for me.  I took advantage of being able to enjoy them at the office where Peter was completely oblivious.  He still shows absolutely no interest in a candle at all - and so I am happy to have not only a vanilla candle in the warmer tucked away on the living room bookshelf, but a candle actually burning on my desk for most of the day.  It doesn't take much to please me; I'm simple that way.

Which is not to say that I don't miss the all of the cats, because I do.  Terribly - so much so sometimes that I can hardly bear to think about them and where they all might be now.  These are my grey twinkie boys: Walter Kroncat and Charles Kuralt.  I know that Tim's cat lady friend found a home for Charley, but the last I knew, Walter was still at the farm living in the cow barn with his sister Lucie Bee, Louis XII, Sophie, Ernest Hemingway and my sixteen-year-old Eddie, aka Edward R. Murrow.  I love them all and I hope they know that - but life changes sometimes and there is nothing we can do about it.  It wasn't my decision to split them up and give them away - but I also know that I assign human emotions to them when I am rational enough to know that they are animals and have most likely forgotten all about me.

It doesn't make it hurt any less.

And when life doesn't turn out the way we have hoped it would, we find other ways to occupy our time.  At least I have - and I may have finally found - or rediscovered - my calling.  I recently read that the things we do while we are procrastinating to keep from working are probably the things we are really meant to be doing all along.  The writer of the original thought put it much more eloquently - but that's the gist of it.  I write when I should be working - and I've always dreamed of writing for a living.  For years I've written and edited and torn up my work.  I've started and stopped and started again.  I finally decided over the past couple of weeks that the only way I would ever find out if I could really write fiction was to just throw my words out to the universe and see if anyone bothered to read them.  I've challenged myself to write my first real mystery one day at a time - a chapter at a time for a small but hopefully growing audience.  If my readers want to know how the story ends, then I'll have to write it.  If they hate it, well - that's fine, too.  At least I will have finished the story.  I found this funny photograph today of me with my first typewriter; I must have been about six.  My sister looks stunned - I'm not sure why.  But I was having a good time.  Maybe I knew what my calling was back then - and I somehow lost sight of it along the way.  I've graduated to more sophisticated writing tools over the years, but I'm hoping to rediscover the joy of story-telling.