Cats in the White House...Thanksgiving...
Before we get started, just wanted to mention that we heard over the weekend that a cat will be coming to the White House in 2021...
My first thought: oh, great, now cats everywhere will be even more insufferable than they already are...
Also learned over the weekend that President Abraham Lincoln had a couple of cats during his time at the White House.
Information shared in an article posted on the website for the Presidential Pet Museum explained that President Lincoln “was given an unexpected gift of two kittens from Secretary of State William Seward.” (As always, since the information about Lincoln’s cats was found on the internet, it must be true...)
The website continued, explaining that Mr. Lincoln “doted on the cats, which he named Tabby and Dixie, so much that he once fed Tabby from the table during a formal dinner at the White House.”
A friend, the article continued, “recalled how the president would pick up one of the cats and “talk to it for half an hour at a time.” During his first term in office, the article shared, “Lincoln was said to have observed in frustration, ‘Dixie is smarter than my whole cabinet! And furthermore she doesn’t talk back!”
And, not unlike a certain special person in my life, Mr. Lincoln “had a special infinity for stray cats and was known to bring them home on occasion.”
Meanwhile...moving on to some other stuff...
Guess we can all agree that 2020 has been, well, a little bit...unusual...odd...out of the ordinary...(pick your own word, or words, if you would like)...
Maybe that would explain a couple of things that happened on The Journey Through Life during past week or so...
For example, yours truly saw fireworks at the Anna City Park...on a cold, clear November night... That was a first.
Like lots and lots and lots of other folks, The Other Half and yours truly celebrated a rather unusual Thanksgiving last week.
It was just the two of us...and our cats. We had a Thanksgiving feast for two...a turkey that looked remarkably like a chicken...one of the last tomatoes out of the garden...potatoes grown by The Other Half in her garden...pumpkin custard (no pie crust...it’s kind of a long story)...and (at least for yours truly) a whole bunch of whipping cream (the kind you spray out of a can – the good stuff)...
And, yes, the cats shared in just a little bit of our Thanksgiving feast...they seemed to enjoy the chicken...
(For the record, what was left of our Thanksgiving fowl was transformed into homemade chicken soup for dinner on Saturday night. Good stuff.)
On Thanksgiving night, we joined gazillions of other folks and had a family Zoom meeting...very strange experience, these Zoom gatherings...but it was nice to see folks...
Thanksgiving Day actually started with a bit of a tradition...yours truly baked some cinnamon rolls...been doing this for many, many years. Have to admit, though, that the rolls were not made from scratch...baked the kind that come out of a tube that you smack on the edge of the kitchen counter...still, they were good...in keeping with tradition.
Tried to watch a football game on Thanksgiving Day. Yup. That was strange, too. Sure, there was a game being played on the field...there just were not many, if any, fans in the stands...
Thanksgiving Day included a nice long walk around town...
The walk took me past a majestic tree which is not far from home. I believe the tree is an oak of some sort. That’s the tree, branches now bare of leaves, in the photograph.
From what I understand, oak trees can live to a very ripe old age...maybe for hundreds of years, depending on the variety.
I wondered how many Thanksgiving Days had come and gone during the life of this particular tree. And, in keeping with 2020, I wondered if the tree had been growing the last time we experienced a global pandemic. Seemed like an awfully deep sort of thought for a holiday.
The rest of our Thanksgiving holiday weekend was pretty quiet. Saturday night, we once again welcomed a possum which paid a visit to our front porch. This critter was pretty stubborn...went outside to shoo it away...it bared its teeth at me...and I needed a broom stick to encourage our visitor to move along.
Sunday night, we had another special visitor. This time it was a raccoon. We hadn’t seen a raccoon on our front porch in a number of years.
The way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if reindeer show up on the front porch one night in a few weeks. Hey, it’s been a strange year...
One last thing for this week...dinner on Sunday evening included our last tomato from The Other Half’s 2020 garden. A “fresh” tomato on the next-to-last day of November wasn’t bad at all.
With that in mind, The Other Half already is making plans and working on next year’s garden. She’s ordered seeds. And she continues to work on having a small greenhouse in the backyard.
Planning next year’s garden, of course, is a good thing. After all, 2021 is going to be “normal.” Right...