"Brightness Falls from the air," wrote Thomas Nashe, ages ago. Yet, he might have been staring out our windows at the extraordinarily bright blue sky threaded with branches licked with white. With every motion of wind, "Brightness falls from the air."

A few hours ago, I stood enthralled at the kitchen door, dolled up to go shovel, but unable to move, the beauty was so breath-taking--the brilliance of light, the high, brilliant blue of sky, and this tracery of branches that have been dark and drear for so many months. It is a panorama of bliss--flowers of snow waiting for the wind to pluck, showers of silver dissolving before anyone could spend them.

It has been one of the longest winters I can remember, here in the cold and dark heartland. Certain things have been fearsome: numero uno: our dear and only cat Julia has declined. Black and white, friendly as a chirrupping grasshopper, yet losing fur on two legs, and slowly subsiding--into what? Not death, not that, when we two humans who love her as our child, need her warmth, her friendly licks, her occasional sillyness. High in that category: the love-affair with the red holiday ribbon, somehow left to its own devices from some holiday package, and soon adopted as Julia's maybe kitten. She's been carrying that ribbon in her mouth up hills and down dales for weeks.

When we first knew her, she was recovering from the loss of a baby (she only a teenager), and a somewhat botched hysterectomy. Yet she recovered and seemed primed for a long and happy life.
Yesterday after blood work at the vet's, we discovered she has feline diabetes. She's lost weight, so say the vets, which we didn't notice, dropping a pound and a half in nine months. She pees enough to water the garden at Como Conservatory. She eats enough to foster a small horse. These are not good signs.

Of course we will give her insulin--but that passage has yet to be maneuvered. Come tomorrow and the next few days, we all three will be initiated into the use of needles, the necessity of regularity, the hope against hope that our darling pal can remain with us for months, years, the rest of a lifetime.

*** Here is Thomas Nashe's poem:

Brightness falls from the air?

"Brightness falls from the air" is a line from A Litany in Time of Plague, a death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe:

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;

This world uncertain is;

Fond are life's lustful joys;

Death proves them all but toys;

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made,

The plague full swift goes by;