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© Catherine Haslag

Piney

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She started as a foster kitten. My boyfriend’s foster kitten three years before he was my boyfriend. Rather than being adopted by another family, he kept her, loved her, made her part of his. He was happy to turn his apartment into a kitty play place for her, for all of the kittens he fostered. He has a heart bigger than any space can hold.

I met Piney for the first time in Spring 2020. She is a skittish cat. She typically runs when someone walks her way. She hides from guests. She is scared of the loud, the unfamiliar, the new. She took to me quickly. Let me rub her belly. Slept on my feet. The next time I saw her weeks later she came running to me, begging in her cat way to have her head and neck scratched. This was unusual for her and her humans noticed.

When my boyfriend needed to be away from home for weeks to handle a family matter, I offered to take her so he didn’t need to worry about her. So she didn’t need to be alone. She spent the first day hiding in the covers on the floor at the foot of my bed. She snuck around the house, afraid of everything. All the sounds were new, the smells were different, and her male human was nowhere around. It was just us girls and she was uncertain.

It took some time, but she started to venture out. She didn’t run when I walked past her or bent to scratch behind her ears. She snuggled at my feet in the evening when I read and slept between my legs at night. She found the squirrels that live in the tree on my patio and tracked the birds that perch in the front bush. She climbed to the top of her cat tree and watched the cars pass on the street. She made this her home and picked me as her human. She became a different feline. My boyfriend was amazed at the change in Piney and decided she had picked her forever home. She stayed with me.

Piney has become my 4-legged furry teacher. Slowly wedging herself into my life. Between the covers of my bed. Balancing like a gymnast on my headboard and dismounting onto my nightstand. Our relationship expanded from sleepover buddy to roommate.

I am very particular about my home, yet she has charmed me into buying a cat tree for the office, a small hidey-hole for her in the living room, and rearrange my kitchen to allow space for a litter box. I love having her here, but living alone for the past 5 years has caused me to atrophy. I am not as malleable as I once was. Piney has made this clear to me. Loving her is easy but making physical space in my home for her has been a challenge.

I have become rigid in my middle-age. My adult life has been guided by routines, plans, and Google Calendar. Piney doesn’t fit in any of those. She can’t be scheduled and her needs are different than mine. She is teaching me to make space for the unscheduleable, for the belly rubs on the carpet at 6:13a and the catnap at my feet at 7:42p. She has left her paw marks on my heart, her fur on my couch, and kitty litter everywhere.

She is slowly prying me open to her, open to life. Reminding me that the best things in life aren’t planned. That there is time in the morning to sit and stretch for a minute. That your perspective can change with a purr and a good neck scratch. That change can bring good things into your life.

© Catherine Haslag

More Than DNA

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I have seen more than a few conspiracy theories cropping up lately, one of which claimed that the coronavirus vaccine will alter our DNA to the extent that we will no longer be human. There are entertaining and interesting videos on the subject on YouTube, all containing false information and spreading dangerous ideas. I don’t wish to acknowledge these videos here (you can go look them up if you want, but I refuse to give them press and help them spread false information, but they did inspire me to think about what really makes us human.

Christmas cards from friends and family in 2020 – love in paper form and delivered by USPS.

Our humanity, our humanness, isn’t defined by our DNA, rather by how we treat others. Showing empathy, compassion, and respect for our neighbor.

When we call names and divide, we dehumanize.

When we exclude groups, we dehumanize.

When we expect others to assimilate, we dehumanize.

When we hold people in cages, we dehumanize.

When we stereotype or otherwise create a group that is “other,” we dehumanize.

We think we are dehumanizing them, but we are really dehumanizing ourselves. Humanity comes with unity and love, not with division and hate. Humanity exists in our souls, not our DNA. When we cut others down and attempt to make them lesser, we are really taking chips away at our own humanity, turning ourselves into something other than human. Something other than a being created in God’s image. God doesn’t think anyone is a thug, a criminal, an illegal, or worthy of anything less than all the love God has to offer. So why do we?

God loves us ALL the same. We are the ones who behave as if God doesn’t.

There is no reason to be afraid that someone is going to inject us with something that will change our DNA and not make us human. Being human has nothing to do with DNA.

It has to do with how we treat each other.

© Catherine Haslag

Warmth and Laughter

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A beautiful Christmas tree in St. Paul, MN 2020

Christmas 2020 was different for most everyone.

I typically travel home to Missouri to visit my family. We used to gather at my uncle’s for dinner before or after Christmas Eve mass. He loved to make New England Clam Chowder and play Christmas music on his stereo during the holiday celebrations. We would enjoy a meal and laughs together. When both my grandparents were still alive, sometimes my cousin and I could talk them into letting us open one gift on Christmas Eve. One year we both chose to open the heaviest package. It turned out to be a pound of nails from my grandpa. That year, we were consumed with building forts outside. There wasn’t a board on the property we hadn’t punched full of nails to build our forts. We even confiscated the dog bed for one of our structures before we were told to put it back. I don’t know if grandpa was trying to encourage our interest or simply keeping us from consuming more of his nails. So much Christmas tradition has changed over the years; however, the warmth and laughter of those times with family and friends have always been a part of Christmas for me. It is the one tradition that hadn’t failed me.

This Christmas has been very different for me and not just because of social distancing. My uncle died in 2019 and the family home we celebrated so many Christmas days in sold last month. This year was going to be different for my family even before COVID-19 jumped the pond. I chose not to travel home to see my family because of coronavirus. My significant other and I had a quiet Christmas at my house instead. We made Indian Butter Chicken (I chose a non-traditional Christmas dinner on purpose) and celebrated Zoom style with various family and friends. We spent the day in our jammies, exchanged gifts, watched Soul on Disney+ (totally worth the watch), drove around and looked at Christmas lights (it was a banner year for Christmas lights), and ate enough sweets to make us diabetic. It was cold outside in Minnesota and there was snow on the ground, but there were warmth and laughter inside.

Of all the things that have changed about Christmas for me, warmth and laughter is one tradition that remains constant. May it remain constant for you as well.

The Life of a House

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This is the family home sometime in the 1910s.

There was an old farm-house that once sat on Fort Avenue in Springfield, Missouri. It didn’t fit the structural style of the nearby ranch homes constructed around it in the 1970s and 80s, so it was likely the home of the family who previously farmed the land before the area was developed. It was a two-story wood-framed home with a small front porch. It was clear no one lived there nor had for awhile. The house sat dark and cold.

Every time I drove past this house, I thought of the life that once filled it. How it kept a family dry during the spring rains. How a mother snuggled her young child in an upstairs bedroom on an autumn evening before turning out the lights. The many warm holiday celebrations held in the home for beloved family and friends. Celebrants gathered, singing Christmas songs with a beverage in hand, the united voices uncontained by the plaster and siding. This house once held space for its occupants when they grieved the loss of a loved one or birthed a new life into the world. The grassy green yard hosted games of baseball, tag, and hide-and-seek. The warmth, laugher, and love that once filled the corners of every room seemed to ooze out of the broken windows, evaporating away. There is a reason why empty houses fall into decay so quickly: there is no love to keep them standing.

This house was demolished sometime between 2007 and 2009. The placeholder for the lives that once occupied that home wiped away. Google Street View of the property shows it hasn’t been redeveloped. All that is left is an empty parcel.

Do we really give houses the gratitude they deserve? They are our basecamp, the place we always know we can return to from our adventures out in the world. They provide warmth, shelter, and safety for those we hold dear. Homes hold our memories and stories and tell them in a mark on the wall or the squeak of a floorboard. A house can hold a family’s history and be a stable nucleus for the generations that grow up in its walls. A place where everyone comes back and again to congregate, share, and love.

That last Thanksgiving my family celebrated in the family home, November 2019. Thank you to Peggy Dunsworth for providing this photo.

Recently, the house my great-grandparents built-in 1908 was sold. This 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath home was the place 5 generations of my family lived, laughed, and loved together. We celebrated nearly 70 Thanksgivings with our cousins in the dining room, opened gifts for over 100 Christmases in the living room, and prepared nearly 41,000 meals in the kitchen (yes, I did the math). My grandmother and all of her siblings were born in that house and at least one person (my great grandmother) was laid out there so people could pay their last respects.

The last Thanksgiving we celebrated there was in 2019. More than 30 family members remembering, laughing, crying, and commemorating what we all knew would be our last Thanksgiving in that sacred place. At one point, I felt like all the Thanksgivings that had ever been celebrated there were intersecting. As if all the generations of my family that knew that home were there in some way to join in one last big party across time.

Thankfully, the house has a new family to fill it with love. It will not meet the empty fate of the house on Fort Avenue, at least not now. While that house is no longer the nucleus for my family, I am thankful for all the years it held us within its boundaries and grateful that a new family will love it into the future.

© Catherine Haslag

Class Reunions

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Recently I began to wonder why we still hold high school reunions and how this tradition started. I tried to research this and there isn’t much to be found. About an hour’s worth of research uncovered a few opinion pieces where people contemplate if they are going to their high school reunion and why this is still a thing, a history of reunions at Princeton, a lot of class reunion announcements and summaries of the events, and a few pieces about weight loss and improving your looks before attending a class reunion. Vanity is apparently a cousin to the high school reunion. The best I can determine is that class reunions date back at

Me at my high school graduation.  I was fat and wore glass until my senior year, when I dropped a bunch of weight and got contacts, thankfully.

least 200 years. Beyond that, I don’t have any details as to the origins of this practice.

Today, in the US, this ritual is held approximately every 5 years for most high school classes.  Some small colleges also hold class reunions, but in the US, this event is generally saved to remind us of adolescence past – a tumultuous time that some of us are very happy to leave in the past.

In school, I was the fat, nerdy kid with glasses who had a big vocabulary I wasn’t afraid to use. During my freshman and sophomore years, I read sci-fi books rather than chit chat with my classmates between classes or on the bus. I had zero athletic ability and wasn’t afraid to answer (or ask) questions during class. As you can imagine, this made me really popular with my peers. I was one of those who found their tribe when they went to college. High school wasn’t exactly hell for me but it definitely wasn’t the best 4 years of my life.

When the time came, I decided to attend my 5-year reunion. I hoped to connect with some of my high school friends only to discover the only people who came were those who were still living in the same clique of friends they had in high school. They had all settled close to home after graduation. Some went to college and then settled back in the area after earning their degree. I had nothing in common with them and didn’t feel the need to make small talk (my own personal hell) with people I couldn’t relate to in high school let alone years later. When I found this same scene at the 10-year reunion, I decided this wasn’t for me. I won’t be attending future reunions.

I feel high school reunions try to celebrate who we were, where we came from, and who we are now but fail to hit the mark. When we return to this situation with people we knew in a very limited context, we tend to revert in some ways to who we were in high school I don’t dislike who I was at 16, 17, or 18, but I do really like who I am now. I would rather hang out with who I am now than revisit who I was then. Reunions remind me of school dances with loud music, awkward small talk, and never getting asked to dance during the slow songs. For me, it’s a superficial event that I survive not enjoy. I would much rather connect with a few specific high school friends over drinks or dinner. This provides me with the deeper, more meaningful connection that I crave.

For those who enjoy reunions, more power to you. Have a enjoy remembering that time a bunch of guys from the senior class drove tractors to school during spirit week for “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” day.

I will be there in spirit only.