When we fixed our barn cats, Kevin, my horse vet said that you spend money on those barn cats and they’ll be gone before you know it, but we could not afford more kitties, so off to Tails they went. Brave and Girl Cat ended up ghosting us, the loss a thud in my gut because I never knew what happened.
Tyger and Gray have grown into sleek, striped cats with scraggly, poufy tails and shiny coats. We take pleasure in watching them watching us from the barn. Mama cat watches from the shed. Sometimes they’ll lounge like young men at the beach. They climb the rafters like trees.
One night I woke at 2 am and saw Gray, sleeping next to our front door. Even though they were born here, there’s no curling around our legs or reaching for our hands to stroke the sides of their faces. The closest I get is a quiet mew, which means, “Leave now, so I can eat.”
When I wake, I wonder if they made it through the night. Coyotes have howled behind the barn, so close I shouted at them, like I was banishing dogs, my heart thumping. Eagles have perched high in our poplar tree. So much danger. I can’t protect three beloved barn cats. I can only trust they know to stay hidden when the predators come. Every morning, I ask Bruce have you seen the cats today?
Think about it. This isn’t just about barn cats, is it?
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.
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The Week of Two Big Storms and Burning Rubber
The first night storm cells and lightning banged north of us, south of us, west of us. I walked the dogs like I do at 6:30 but turned back once I hit the head of the driveway. Lightning stroked thick fire, hotter than the sun’s surface. Thunder rolled. Our local news station warns a person could be struck by lightning if you hear thunder. I feel like I need to duck when storms come close like walking through a low hanging door. My heart races. It’s a good thing I haven’t taught the dogs to be afraid of them. I turned back to the house, giving the dogs a quick potty break. I pulled Morgen into the barn, tossed her hay.
Finally the storm arrived with rain blowing horizontally, so thick we could barely see the trees across the driveway. Lightning struck so close its light flashed in the house. Thunder boomed instantaneously. I looked at the barn to make sure it hadn’t been struck. With no tornado watches or warnings, we stayed upstairs, catching scenes from The Bachelorette, between weather warnings by our local meteorologist.
We hadn’t seen a storm this hot for several years. Usually they sound like giant tympani way high. The clouds roil, their globes glowing when lightning flashes.
The second night was supposed to be violent with multiple tornadoes roaring through our region. When the weather people talk about mesoscale convection, I listen. Whenever I hear “mesoscale” mentioned, along with a tornado watch, our life in this house with this stuff, flashes before my eyes. These tornado warned storms threaten to toss over houses like Jesus tossed the tables in the temple. Stuff that’s not just things, but tangible goods, gifts, from our families, that we can hold in our hand or look at and be reminded of their real love for us.
As I gathered our clothes, limp on the clothesline, I thought how frail they are, the garments that shield our nakedness while portraying our moods and work, in the face of high winds, that flip the roof of houses, and yank trees by the roots.
I think how those winds would lift my notebooks like pigeons, maybe dropping them in someone’s yard, my private thoughts thumbed through by a stranger. My Breyer horses, trotting and rearing on my shelves, would fly thousands of feet up like Pegasus and plunge back to a farmer’s field, only to tilled in with the crop. I remember how Bruce and I picked up nails, insulation, splintered wood in a friend’s pasture after the EF 4 tornado, nine years ago.
I put Mrs. Horse in the barn with several flakes of hay, hoping the barn holds.
Knowing the power of many prayers, I asked friends on Facebook to remember Bruce and I along with our region in prayer. I stood on the porch, mumbling, “Peace be still. Be still.” If Jesus told the waves to shut up and sit down, I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to speak to quiet the storm.
Because of the warnings, I shoved the cats in the crates and hauled them to the basement. Since the dogs were afraid of the open stairs, I harnessed them and lifted them down. I brought chairs and my computer down along with my purse and our wallets and my jewelry.
Here the storm was a dud without much thunder. Wind-blown rain didn’t last long. No trees were busted.
Both nights our electricity was knocked out. Bruce had to drag the generator to the back of the house, plug it in, as the rain poured. It was vital to keep the sump pump running. Our yard sounded like a steam show. The second night he knelt before the machine, the pull rope broken, and rain pouring, the water filling in our basement, as he threaded the rope enough to start it. Patient. He was patient. We were back on in a few hours.
These Tornadoes turned out to be EF 0’s and EF 1’s. The National Weather service cited 33 tornadoes in northern Illinois on August 15, three days after the assassination attempt on President Trump. When I walked the road the next morning, I saw how the corn was tipped over. A black walnut branch had crumpled into a widow maker. There were multiple trees down and power outages in the area.
The third night, as we were doing night chores—walking the dogs, we saw and heard a pickup truck parked just south of our driveway. He sat on the tires burning rubber so hard it smelled for minutes afterward. My fingers were close to punching 911. Then they gunned it down the road. But they roared back, pulled in our driveway. I held up my camera, snapped pictures. They roared away to the south. Bruce remarked, “They burned 40,000 miles off those tires. Each one costs around $500.” The next morning there were more jagged marks to the north.
The devil, not a roaring lion, but in the form of a pickup, slanty headlights, scaring the Jesus out of me because it felt they are marking our property like a dog pissing on bushes and I wondered if they were country boys tagging the road or just young men, rowdy and angry.
My heart thumped. Bruce said they’re just neighbor kids burning rubber. When the fields are clear we can see all the way to the machine shed that stays lit into the night, a gathering place for the locals to talk mechanics, farming and whatever else.
This was the week following the attempted assassination of former President Trump. It was hard to believe he was standing there, then swatting his face, in slow motion the Secret Service shoving him down. He stood fist in the air, mouthing, “Fight. Fight. Fight” a shaken fist at the powers. But it was odd how the people behind him just sat. President Kennedy’s assassination began a decade where our country unspooled. By the time I was in high school I wondered if there’d be enough country left so I could go to college and get married. Are we on the same brink of chaos here?
Then came the Republican National Convention and the CrowdStrike outage. Even though he refused at first, President Biden stepped down from being the Democratic presidential candidate, though he remains president and Vice President Harris took his place. Some of us wonder who is running the country. Russian and Chinese unarmed nuclear bombers flew within two hundred miles of Alaska. For those ten days my eyes and ears and thoughts were filled with the national drama, with breaks for companionable walking with the dog and currying the horse.
Paul Kingsnorth in The Abbey of Misrule writes about how he has sensed that the image of Trump’s standing up with his fist raised and mouthing “Fight, Fight, Fight” with the American flag waving against the blue sky reflects a deep mysterious reality. He says, “What we call ‘politics’ is always a manifestation of what is happening in the depths, but in the depths move forces that are beyond us. Sometimes you see images that make this clear to you.”
I have felt for a long time, there’s an authoritarian noose wrapping around the world. People can be arrested for posting on social media in Britain. And British censors want to extradite Americans for their social media posts. The EU told Elon Musk he was violating hate speech laws by interviewing Trump on X.
During the Truckers Strike in Canada Trudeau blocked people’s bank accounts if they donated so much as $25 to the cause. Tulsi Gabbard was followed by Air Marshals and bomb sniffing dogs under the TSA’s Quiet Skies program.
There are pockets of genocide throughout the world.
I think of the passage in Revelation, towards the end, where God has opened the abyss and loosed the devil, the spirit of lies, on the world, to deceive the nations. We are bathed in lies. It’s getting so a person can’t tell what’s true. When I’m pull my eyes off the chaos I remember Psalm 2 where the psalmist talks about the nations raging and the people’s plotting in vain. “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’ He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, ‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill’” (Ps 2: 2 – 6, ESV).
Kingsnorth wonders how we should respond to these forces rising to the surface and comes back to what Jesus said, “Repent.” “Change your mind. Change your heart. Change your direction. Change the orientation of your seeing. Change your whole life.” It’s not changing your mind, but it’s turning your heart toward God. I’m not so good at this, though my heart is softening, my scarred heart is turning to flesh as he promised when he said he would turn our stony hearts to flesh.
Lately I’ve awakened afraid that something I said on social media might land me in solitary. The idea of sitting in a cell with no windows, perhaps with one other person, gives me the shivers as bad as an MRI machine. Then I lie awake praying for people on my list. I say the Jesus Prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.”
Kingsnorth says a voice came to him saying, “keep the peace of your heart at all times.” He states how powerful this is, “Attain the spirit of peace, said St Seraphim of Sarov, and thousands of people around you will be saved.”
And then I think of the old hymn, “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee” which tells how the disciples came to bad ends. John died alone on Patmos. Peter was crucified head down. “Contented, peaceful fishermen,/Before they ever knew/The peace of God that filled their hearts.Brimful, and broke them too,/Brimful, and broke them too.”
The hymn ends with, “The peace of God, it is no peace, But strife closed in the sod. Yet, let us pray for but one thing: The marv’lous peace of God, The marv’lous peace of God.” There’s something defiant about this hymn, something that gives a person courage about a peace that might be shaking with fear while stepping on ice that supports our weight even while water runs beneath.
Kingsnorth is wise to tell us to keep the peace in our heart at all times. In Proverbs it says, Guard your heart for from it flow the wellsprings of life. (Prov 4:3), The powers want us afraid, outraged. They want us reducing our relationships to our opinions and deciding who our friends and family should be based on whether we agree. But we are so much more than those opinions. Jesus turned down the Prince of the Power of the air, when he offered to give him the kingdoms of the earth. Maybe we should turn down the invitation as well. We are told not to put our trust in princes, or horses that are a vain hope for deliverance.
Since the powers are kill joys, maybe we should sing and dance and joke and take long walks and play fetch with our dogs.
Maybe we should become healing presences. Maybe we should trust the Lord to rain down his light and peace between us. Maybe we should do what Paul Young says when he closes his podcast, “Participate in Love. Do the next right thing. Trust the ripples.”
Back to the cats. Every morning I ask Bruce if he’s seen the brothers and he says, yes,yes I have and Mama cat too. And I walk the dog down the road, on one side shielded by corn taller than I am, dark as a forest between the stalks. I wonder at the bee balm, because it’s the most beautiful delicate flower. I talk to God until I become silent.
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Works Cited
Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.
Kingsnorth, Paul. “All the World Is Myth.” The Abbey of Misrule, The Abbey of Misrule, 15 July 2024, paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/all-the-world-is-myth
Author: William Alexander Percy(no biographical information available about William Alexander Percy.) Go to person page >. “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.” Hymnary.Org, hymnary.org/text/they_cast_their_nets_in_galilee. Accessed 17 Aug. 2024
“Seraphim of Sarov.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org/Seraphim_of_Sarov. Accessed 17 Aug. 2024.