Midnight Mutterings | Carrie Newcomer poem

Was born a very long time ago in Raleigh, North Carolina, but the first place I can remember living was in a small village on the Cape Fear River. There I had an idyllic life with my father, a housekeeper named Miss Sadie, a tiny chicken named Rooster, an equally tiny Shetland Pony named Virginia Dare, and Winston Churchill, who happened to be a dog. There were occasional visits from my mother, my three older siblings, who lived somewhere else where the schools were ‘better.’ (I was too young for school.) Possibly they came every week end. All I know is that they left as inexplicably as they arrived. After that we all lived together on seventy acres on the outskirts of Raleigh, in a house my father built from the trees on the property. Plus some glass and plaster and old slate for the roof. Eventually I escaped to New York City, where I lived twice, to Detroit, back to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for the third time, to the Bay Area in California, to Charlottesville, Virginia, then to Washington State east of the mountains, to Seattle, to Waldron Island for a couple of years then at last to Obstruction Pass, here on Orcas, where I’ve been for 30 years with time off in Seattle, on a sailboat in Bellingham Bay and on Stuart Island. This is already too long and all I’ve talked about is moving. I did birth a couple of delightful kids along the way; no grandchildren to speak of. For now I have everything I need except a cat. Do you have a spare cat?