“Gently Does It,” I Told Myself

I never thought I’d be the mother of a traumatized cat.

Charlie the stray is still sleeping on my porch. She chases off the other strays, not to mention the groundhogs, so the yard is nicer than it was before she came. She hides from the children who are her rightful owners, and comes out when they’re gone. She arches her back and hisses to protect me when a stray dog happens by. Every morning, as Adrienne leaves for school, Charlie comes to the door for a can of Friskies. She comes back for her second can at dinnertime. She likes to follow after me when I go outside; she sits on the sidewalk, meowing sadly for me, when I get in the car.

I do like the company. But she hasn’t yet learned to stop biting. She lets me pet her for a few minutes and then lunges to bite my hand.

“Hello, Charlie. Want to help me weed the garden?” I asked.

The cat perked up her ears and followed me.

She likes to wait on the porch for me to start around the back of the house, and then leap through the gap in the railing and join me. The terrible child who used to visit our house every day back in 2016 made that gap. He always wanted to break things. One day he started smashing the lattice in between the slats on the porch with a wooden board he found, just to see it shatter. When he started hurting little Adrienne as well, I had to bar him from coming back to my house. I think he’s a high school dropout now. Thinking about that makes me hate myself, as if I could have saved him if I’d just tried harder.

As soon as I got to the backyard, I bent to examine the new black raspberry planting. There are invasive black raspberry bushes all over town. People don’t like them, because they’re a weed that will creep all over a yard and turn it into a minefield of thornbushes. That’s how I got a raspberry bush for free with a little digging. Somebody else was relieved of a mess. I got a tangled, thorny vine that I planted in a pile of compost in the concrete planter on my back porch. I hoped the concrete and the sidewalk that runs in front of it would keep runners from going everywhere, so I could prune it and just have one rectangle of black raspberry bushes. It’s working, so far. The raspberry that nobody wanted survived the transplant shock. I didn’t think there would be any fruit at all this year, but now it’s covered in white blossoms, pretty as roses.

As I pulled weeds around the raspberry, the cat flopped over on the steps. She showed her belly, which is still shaved and scarred from the spay. What she wanted me to do was pat her so that she could grab my hand with her forepaws and lunge in for a bite. I fell for that the first few times, but I’m wise now.

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Charlie.”

The strawberries are getting ripe. In May of 2020, when the whole world was falling to pieces, I planted five strawberry plants. The stalking neighbor who used to live in the haunted house tore out one of the strawberries, along with all the broccoli and several bean poles, and then smeared her dog’s poo all over the front porch, one June morning. She was always doing things like that. She had hallucinations that Michael and I were pressing our faces to the windows to make the dog bark, and this was her vengeance. She left for the hospice early in 2023. Those four remaining strawberry plants just kept sending out runners, and now I have a bigger crop than I can manage in late May. Meanwhile, her memory feeds into my post-traumatic stress disorder. Just the other day, I panicked when I saw a woman who looked like her. I’ve been embarrassed ever since.

Charlie the cat likes to chase the neighbor’s ghost. Or, at least, she likes to stop in the middle of whatever game she’s playing and stand stock still, staring at the haunted house. Then she bolts forward onto that side of the property line and pounces on invisible foes again and again. She always ends up under the haunted house’s back porch, looking confused but determined. I think there’s a groundhog hole under there, but I pretend that the cat is protecting me from a restless spirit. It helps the panic go away.

That was the game that Charlie began to play as I finished with the strawberries and moved on to the corn.

While Charlie dispelled the evil spirits, I pulled up crabgrass around the corn plantings. I’m trying to succession plant a bit of sweet corn every two weeks, so the neighbors and I can eat it off the cob in August, but so little is growing up. And now I’m bemused, because corn looks like a blade of grass when it first sprouts, and so does crabgrass. I don’t want to yank out my corn. But by the time the blades are big enough to tell the difference, the corn is only two inches high and the crabgrass has colonized a whole patch. It’s like a much more difficult version of the parable of the wheat and the tares, and it annoys me.

The cat finished her battle. She went to sun herself and lick her paws on the patio. I fussed over the vegetable patch. This is the first year that the pumpkins are doing better than the zucchini. I’ve managed to get exactly one watermelon seedling, but it’s holding on. The sunflowers are up past my ankles now, and they’ll be over my head in a month. The tomatoes are taking their time. The beans are coming up.

My rose bush has at least fifteen buds on it. A few weeks ago, the Artful Dodgers trooped through my yard on the way to their bible study. They set down their Bibles and helped me plant a few violas around the rose, before heading to the Protestant church on the next block. There were no buds on the rose then, so the boy Dodger called my rose a thornbush. I hoped he’d be surprised when he came and saw it covered in flowers. Later in the year, I could show the little girls how to make rose hip tea.

Just then, while weeding around the rosebush, I remembered the Lost Girl saying she wanted me to teach her to garden once she got into a house with a yard. I despised myself, yet again, for not being able to help her children. I hated myself with a passion, even though I knew that there was nothing on earth I could have done, nothing anyone could do. I hated her as well. I hated her abusive parents and her abusive boyfriend. I hated this traumatized valley where the Rust Belt collides with the Appalachian foothills, and I wished Jesus would come back and damn us to hell.

Charlie meowed at me, expectantly. She padded over to the tall grass and laid down on her side again.

I reached for her– not to pet that belly, but to touch her paw. She didn’t bite, so I held the paw with two of my fingers and a thumb to see what would happen.

She pulled my hand in and lunged, baring her teeth– but then, instead of biting, she licked me with that strange rough tongue.

I kept holding her paw and she kept licking.

“That’s right, Charlie. Gently does it.”

And then I said “gently does it” to myself as well.

And then I forgot to be angry.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.