Quest

An expedition into the wilderness of thoughts and ideas inspired by nature and the travels of Backcountry Ben

Once Again, Patience Prevails

Waiting is difficult. We live in a time of instant gratification, and we expect the gadgets we own to keep us up to date on everything we want to know, and the restaurants we visit to bring food to the table without delay.

Uncertainty is worse. We want to know what day that new sofa will arrive, or when the election results will be in, or the precise hour our income tax refund will be direct-deposited into our bank account.

We want to know we can count on our friends to be there when we are feeling frightened or ill, even if we may be too busy to visit them when they are frightened or ill.

Yet there are times we must wait, when certainty will be in doubt, and when we will not have a clear indication that friendship will prevail.

Only patience will yield the answer.

For the last few years, we have been feeding a feral cat that makes its home under the barn that used to serve as a home for our horses and pony. We leave food and water in the former gift shop that for many years served as a storage building for grain, shavings, and grooming equipment for the equines that had become more pets than riding animals. The cat rarely appears while we are there, waiting for us to drive away before slipping in through the rear window we leave open for her so she can enjoy her food and drink in peace.

We see her so rarely, some family members have questioned whether she exists at all. All we have to prove she’s there is the empty food dish. For this reason, she came to be known as the Invisible Cat, or Invisi-Kitty.

Cats have their own sense of priorities, and Invisi-Kitty from time to time will wander away and ignore her food. No doubt, while on her walkabout, she finds other sources of food and water, but for us, she has disappeared, and we don’t know whether she will return. After all, there are automobiles that might strike her, or foxes that might chase her, or simply bad weather that calls survival into question.

So it was that, not seeing her for five days, we feared the worst for Invisi-Kitty. We dutifully left the food out each day, and replenished the water in the heated bowl we plugged in to keep the water from freezing, but we began to worry as each day passed. Then the food began disappearing again, and we breathed a sigh of relief.

After the last large snowstorm, however, we had reason to believe she had reached the end. The food was untouched for five days, six days, seven days. Snow had been plowed into a giant pile in front of the barn, and we wondered if she had somehow been buried by accident. We had to take a snow rake to clear the roof of the shop, and worried that she might have been trapped under that building, although we were careful to dig out around the base so there would be an easy ingress and egress. Eight days and she still didn’t appear.

We have friends we do not want to lose track of, and through social media sites, we can keep in touch with most of them. Some, however, eschew Facebook and Twitter and see no reason to join LinkedIn, so for them we need to rely on old-fashioned telephone calls, in-person visits, and mail or email communications. When they don’t return our calls or correspondence, we get worried.

Some we know have become busy with new lives, having recently married or taken a new job. Others have been struggling with health or financial issues and may have been prevented from responding because of relocating or becoming incapacitated. We worry about them, and wonder if we will ever see them again.

Like our dealings with the Invisi-Kitty, we have to maintain hope and patience and trust that, someday, when the time is right, they will contact us again and we can take up our friendship where it left off. It may happen because they need a helping hand, or it may happen because whatever obstacle — real or imagined — kept them away has been removed. Whatever the reason, we know we’ll always welcome them back.

And so it was with Invisi-Kitty. After being absent 10 days and straining our patience by keeping us in the dark as to her fate, the cat began eating her food again. One day, as we were about to drive away, we actually caught sight of her, dashing from beneath the barn to the back of the shop where the partly opened window waited for her.

March 17, 2015