Mary Novaria

Instead of going to the gym, I got my cardio when a hummingbird flew into the house. These birds are so dumb, I thought. But then I remembered, I’m the dummy who routinely leaves the sliding doors open so the dog, a yellow Lab mix, can come in and out as she pleases. In other words, I’m lazy and I don’t want to get up to let Bella in and out every time she has a whim… which is about every ten minutes.  Leaving the doors open is one of the perks of living in a place without tons of insects. It’s a habit that never would have flown when we lived in Kansas. There, June bugs are bigger than hummingbirds. Like moths, they crash against the coach lights on the porch and invite themselves in if you so much as crack open the door to let the cat out. When the kids were young, we had what John called The Nightly Bug Watch. “Daddy! There’s a spider on the ceiling.” “Something’s buzzing in my room!” As if my night owls needed any more excuses not to go to sleep. ...

The three white, plastic boxes were nestled into a larger brown, cardboard box labeled “office” with a black Sharpie and stacked among hundreds of other cartons in a moving van, along with more than two decades worth of furniture, household goods, and memories. Why, I wondered, was I moving the ashes of three dead cats halfway across the country? DaisyBelle Riley, Mose and DaisyBelle left us one by one over a span of three years. I always thought we’d gather the kids and ceremoniously scatter their ashes beneath the branches of a towering evergreen just beyond the backyard fence. We’d say a few somber yet loving words, recall their idiosyncrasies, and retell the stories of how our feline companions first came into our home.  But life intervened. It seemed as if the family was rarely all together anymore and, although I thought about it frequently, I never quite planned the memorial service.  We moved West and the ashes of three Kansas cats sat in a closet in Los...

I could tell you it’s been one of those days... Then I’d remind myself that I don’t live in Moore, Oklahoma. I could say I’m exasperated, waiting for movers who still haven’t left LA, even though we’ve been cooling our heels in a Kansas college town for days. Then I’d remind myself that my daughter’s bike and bed and boxes are not in scattered in shards across the windswept plain. Her things are intact. Dry. Safe. Out of the elements. Hell, forget the stuff . We are dry and safe and out of the elements. We are not fishing through debris, panic-stricken and brokenhearted, listening for the jangle of tags on a dog collar. Sure, we met some challenges on the trek east, weathering rain and snow, lightning and hail through Colorado and Kansas. But we were never anywhere like Moore, Oklahoma. For eighteen years, we lived in Kansas and managed to dodge the twister bullet every time, surveying the aftermath in Greensburg, Kansas (May 2007) and Joplin, Misso...