Lonnie Hull DuPont - Kit Kat and Lucy: The Country Cats Who Changed a City Girls World

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

When I was a single woman in my thirties, I lived in the heart of San Francisco. I loved it there. I stayed for ten years in a third-floor walk-up on Telegraph Hill, and I planned to live there forever.

This was the North Beach district, a handsome and historic Italian neighborhood, flanked by Chinatown and the Bay. I woke each morning to the sounds of foghorns and sea lions, to the smells of garlic and coffee, to a view outside my windows that included cable cars clanging toward downtown at their usual pace of nine miles per hour. My shower had a head-level window through which I could see all of the east side of Russian Hill bathed in morning gold. As I washed my hair, I watched the fog roll off the hill.

Every day I swam in an outdoor pool in my apartment complexyes, right in the heart of the city. I walked everywhere I wanted to go, up and down those famous hills, on knees still young and strong. I was a poet who gained some local reputation in that mecca for poets. I made interesting, lifelong friends. I felt I had found my true home.

At the time, I worked as an acquisitions editor for a publishing house that specialized in books on religion and philosophy. Committee meetings where we decided what to publish were always lively, although often in these meetings we didnt necessarily know much about one anothers area of expertise. One of the editors at these meetings presented projects in an area I didnt understand and even thought was a little weird. To be honest, I seldom had a clue what he was talking about, though he certainly was passionate about it, and Im ashamed to admit I often mentally zoned out during his presentations.

One day as he presented with his usual intensity, I had begun making a mental grocery listuntil the editor said something that broke through and caused me to look straight at him. I dont recall the context, but he said, Weve lost our connection to the land. Weve lost our connection to the animals.

For me, this statement was startling and true. I recognized its truth in my heart immediately. I actually started to ache inside as I sat in that conference room. I had lost my connection to the land. I had especially lost my connection to the animals. I didnt realize until that moment how much I missed having animals in my life.

I was raised in rural southern Michigan on what had been the family farm. My ancestors homesteaded it in 1835, and we lived in the very house they builtmy mother was born in front of the fireplace, and my nephew and his family live there today. I used to sleep by a corner window in my bedroom, tucked into the weather you might say, often waking up on summer nights to lightning storms or on winter mornings to ice frozen on the glass. We no longer had livestock and crops on the property, but we did have horses and large gardens of vegetables.