The Seated View

This is what it feels like to have croup: Croup is terrifying. Every breath is an effort. It starts by feeling vaguely short of breath, progresses to being aware of every breath, and then you start feeling the muscles and tendons in your neck as you take each breath and you begin to hear a noise called stridor as you breathe in. Oddly enough, breathing out is not an effort, but things get worse when you lie down. With each stage, the panic rises, your body instinctively kicking into hyper survival mode. It is not right to feel the effort that goes into breathing. You can’t talk without coughing and your cough sounds like the bark of a seal. As the swelling intensifies, you have to take a long deep breath in to have sufficient air in which to cough. You can’t physically do the sniff it takes to smell something or get rid of a bit of moisture in your nose the structures in your body have changed. You can’t cry because that requires breath and a movement of your throa...

There comes a time in every woman’s life when she has an undeniable urge to wear leopard print. Earlier this week, that urge came to Lucy. The Internet argues that wearing leopard print shows a woman is adventurous and likes to show off , that it’s about power and confidence , and that it turns you into a sexy, bold diva . (‘scuse me while I go shopping for clothes. As an experiment that they might effect a fundamental change in my personality….) A couple weeks ago, Jeanne of Genie4Pets Bling PetCollars contacted me on Facebook, offering to send me/Lucy one of her lovely blingy collars . How could I say no? Deciding on which collar would fit Miss Lucy best took a while — there were so many to choose from. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the turquoise. Unfortunately, it wasn’t available in Lucy’s size, so back to the shop I went. And that’s when I saw the leopard print and all sorts of bells went off. It arrived quickly, packaged with some goodies — can...

When I first moved out on my own, I had a Christmas tree. A live one in a pot. I thoroughly enjoyed decorating it with my own ornaments, and turning on the lights in the evening. After Christmas, it got planted in my sister’s garden, where it lived happily for several years before giving up the ghost. We called it Desmond. The next year, I had been joined by Mojo . I still got a Christmas tree, but had several experiences of Mojo getting her claws stuck in ornaments as she was playing with them. I also got too cheap to have a tree, so the year after that and many years besides, I treated my ficus as my Christmas tree. I got the best of both worlds: festive decorations during the holiday season, with no cost and no carpet of dead pine needles after New Year’s. And then came Lucy . There are a number of differences between Mojo and Lucy. Mojo was a tuxedo cat, Lucy is a white and orange tabby. Mojo never knocked anything over in the 13 years she shared my home, Lucy knoc...