PK: "Cats, I have a confession to make. When Serena's deliveryman rolled up with our Pure Life water, he said I'd better go to Wal-Mart and see what I wanted to buy. He had a point. There didn't seem to be any of our regular Kitten Chow on the shelf. There was a great stack of the pricier "Kitten Naturals." They'd raised the price on Kitten Chow, but not (yet) on Kitten Naturals, so the difference was only a dollar more for only a pound less of the overpriced kibble.
Since youall seem to tolerate Kitten Chow, even thrive on it when it's supplemented with a little human-food-grade meat, and since I had to buy a lot of other things, including a towel to replace the one you deliberately..."
Serena: "The litter in that little box is never going to dry out, and you expect me to keep using it although you have a whole fresh bag! I did it to call your attention to the problem. You will please bear in mind that I chose an old hospital towel instead of anything you seem particularly fond of. You certainly have enough pieces of cloth to choose from."
PK: "I admit it. It's easier and often cheaper to buy a new piece from a nice charity store than it is to haul things to the laundry. I'm totally into the "buy good clothes in the first place, then wear them until they wear out" school of style. And I'm not a clothes hoarder; in fact I had started selling the separate pieces, which I'm too old to bother about putting together into fashion looks any more, in the Friday Market before COVID. I'm still willing to sell them, but not throw them away."
Serena: "So I soaked an old hospital towel you don't even hang in the bathroom any more. You might at least appreciate my taste."
PK: "I do, but you don't have to spend hours on end in the house any more. I only ask you to come into the office to tend your kitten or watch for mice--and I don't think we're going to have so many mice around the house, going forward. It does take skills and talent, however misused, to get away with as many lesser crimes as the Bad Neighbor committed before killing our Pastel, for as long as he did. I don't imagine a lot of people would try it, even if Bayer had started paying them. So you're an outdoor cat who has office privileges, just as you were before the office had a litter box."
Serena: "I like having a litter box. It's a privilege everyone else can see and smell! I want you to clean it so that the smell does not become unpleasant."
PK: "Anyway, when I go to Wal-Mart I like to add up the prices of everything I buy just to make sure the chatter-cheaters don't get away with anything. I like to take in just about exactly the amount of cash I'm going to spend. If I do decide to buy something at an inflated price I like to know that I'm going to have to make an extra run out to the car, then back through the store. It helps me minimize the amount I spend in Wal-Mart. So, the prices added up just right if I bought the regular Kitten Chow. So I brought you that."
Serena: "It was fresh! We like fresh!"
PK: "You and Drudge like Kitten Chow but Traveller didn't exactly thrive on it. We'll never know what-all was wrong with poor little Traveller but I've wondered whether he might have done better on Kitten Naturals. He did seem to feel better the week someone sent us the really ridiculously overpriced kibble. Do you think it would have been worth paying for Kitten Naturals, before the price goes up anyway?"
Serena: "Smaller bags mean you have to buy more fresh kibble. We all like fresh. So I think you should have bought the Kitten Naturals to see how we like them. We did like the really ridiculous brand."
PK: "There is a man in Washington now, a man for whom I have some respect, who's trying to say that poor people should have to buy all of the "healthy choices" in the store. No chips, no candy, no soda pop, no "energy drinks," no "heat'n'eat"...I don't know how far he wants to go in the direction of really mandating that, if you get handout money from the government to buy food, you should be buying whole dried oldfashioned oats and whole dried beans, and spending hours cooking them. It's madly unpopular of course. People are saying, "Well obviously he's never been poor," and dredging up things out of his first life as a spoiled rich brat."
Serena: "Do rich brats like soda pop? I certainly don't. It smells like disgusting oranges and cherries and grapefruit and suchlike."
PK: "Most humans love oranges and cherries and...well, I love grapefruit. I used to have a school friend who used and reused a joke, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do. That leaves you just about anything short of murder, high treason, and eating grapefruit." The other things she said she wouldn't do varied, but eating grapefruit was always what they call the punchline. But I like grapefruit."
Serena: "You are a strange species of dumb animal who can't hunt well enough to survive, so God gave you the ability to eat garbage instead. But at least you're useful."
PK: "Anyway, to answer your question, really rich brats like really stupid things, like taking drugs that nature intended us to use only once in a while, to save someone's life, but these rich brats take them just to see how the drugs will feel for them. Some of them make themselves very sick that way. Mr. Kennedy, who is now our Cabinet Secretary in charge of public health, damaged his throat and can hardly speak. But the experience helped him appreciate being healthy, and he's spent his adult life trying to make it possible for other people to be healthy. I respect that."
Serena: "It sounds good. Though how much do humans know about how to be healthy? Most of the ones we know don't seem to be. You've whined about having been poisoned for years before losing Pastel finally got you to stand up on your hind legs and run the Bad Neighbor out of the neighborhood..."
PK: "No, dear. It wasn't only me. It was the whole neighborhood. A lot of people lost dogs and cats, not to mention Jimmy Skunk, and Silver's possums..."
Serena: "Dare was an old possum, anyway, and Dasher was an idiot even as possums go. We have to change possums every year or two anyway. The new one seems to be all right. Even if nobody's going to teach it to walk up and beg for treats. But you should have dealt severely with that man long ago."
PK: "I was handicapped by wanting to operate within the law. He wasn't. And it's only the last year or two that I've been the better marksman, anyway."
Serena: "A Real Queen doesn't have to be bigger or stronger than other animals. She just has to lay down the law with passionate intensity. My great-great-great-grandmother was a tiny cat but, in defense of her kittens, she rode a huge coy-dog half a mile uphill in the snow!"
PK: "And did anyone ever tell you who shot that coy-dog?"
Serena: "Some human did."
PK: "It was the Bad Neighbor, before he'd poisoned himself. My father didn't approve of hunting but he did appreciate shooting as one of the gifts God had given him, and he would've had to agree that the Bad Neighbor used to have that talent too. Glyphosate destroyed the Bad Neighbor's talents. Which serves him right. He once could shoot a running coyote."
Serena: "Then there's the Nice Neighbor who complains of not being able to read without glasses, and the one who doesn't like to walk up the road any more..."
PK: "They were younger than my parents, but they're in that generation. They're closing in on eighty years old. Don't let's think about it. I don't want to be the head of the clan! I want elders!"
Serena: "And the lot of Nephews that whine about one of them being allergic to cats. And the friend with the diabetes. And..."
PK: "Oh, stop. There's a breed of humans who live seventy or eighty years, and a breed who live ninety or a hundred years, if all goes well. Most of us in this town belong to the longer-lived breed, but not all. I don't know nearly enough people who are under age sixty. What made me sad was hearing a friend whose family definitely belong to the longer-lived breed say that she didn't care about living past age seventy. She doesn't want to admit that she has glyphosate reactions, but that way of thinking about the ones she has was part of them!"
Serena: "My point being that I don't see that humans know very much about their own health."
PK: "We don't, as a species. And we know even less about other people's health. Which is why I wish Mr. Kennedy would accept the original idea of the food stamp program.?"
Serena: "Food stamp? How does that work? You stamp on the ground and someone gives you food?"
PK: "God willing, I never will...but the idea was that instead of the government giving people food that was going to waste, which was usually not very good when it was fresh and usually not fresh when it was handed out to poor people, government would give people what were called stamps, or tickets, or coupons, to buy the same food everyone else ate. It was a good idea. My father was one of those calling for it, when I was just a kitten. He used to load up free food in boxes and have to count how many poor people didn't even want to take it. Then he'd bring it home so that it wouldn't be wasted, and Mother would try to invent ways to cook it so that people would want to eat it, which in some cases was impossible. Powdered egg! Oh, and there was the bitter nutritional yeast she cooked with the stale macaroni and reprocessed "cheese spread." We sat down and took one hopeful bite, and then with one accord we walked outside and scraped our dishes out for the chickens...and the chickens came up and took one hopeful bite, and then with one accord they all started wiping their beaks on the grass and asking us whether we thought that was funny. So Dad wrote to President Nixon about some sort of food tickets that could be used like money, but only to buy food. I didn't know how many other people wrote to President Nixon about the same thing. All I knew at the time was that President Nixon stopped the free food handouts, so Dad lost his main job in town, and that summer we used food stamps to buy our food. It was fun, getting to bake with interesting ingredients like El Molino carob powder and turbinado sugar instead of all those rejects! And Dad still said food stamps were a good idea and Nixon was not as bad as most people said."
Serena: "I've not heard anything about this Mr. Nixon lately."
PK: "He's been dead for years by now. But one thing everyone used to think he'd done right was the food stamp system. But of course some busybodies used to complain, and still do, that poor people don't choose the healthiest food. Of course this is partly an effect of being poor. Plain dried beans are a better bargain than canned beans, if you can stay at home and cook them on your wood stove all day. Whole raw potatoes are much better than potato chips, if you have the time and place to cut up the raw potatoes and cook them. Poor people often don't. They may not have kitchens at all; they may be renting rooms with only room to sleep in, or sleeping in their cars."
Serena: "We don't know anyone like that, do we?"
PK: "Not very well. If we did, and being poor was the only reason why they didn't have kitchens, they could live here and help renovate ours, which still shows damage from the fire ten years ago. But then, of course, some people are poor because they're not very intelligent. A smart, frugal person who cooks at home, even if person doesn't have everything a kitchen should have, has food stamps left over at the end of the month; the government gives them enough. A less intelligent shopper buys food that's not such a good bargain and has month left over at the end of the food stamps. There are a food bank and a church kitchen in town for people like that. They don't starve, but they don't seem to learn how to use their food stamps, either. We now have a system where smart poor people have extra food to give to stupid poor people, which is fun for some of the smart poor people because they enjoy seeing how clever they are, but basically it means smart people are paying stupid people to stay ignorant. Some people complain about this."
Serena: "Why do you want to feed stupid people, anyway? If no one feeds them, won't they learn to hunt for themselves, or at least go away, like stray tomcats that nobody loves?"
PK: "There's a fear that they'd starve to death where they are. Stupid people aren't as clever as stray tomcats. We are not talking about the kind of stupidity that is involved when I don't think about bringing something with me and have to go back to the other room to get it, or the kind of craziness that is involved when you ruin a perfectly good cleaning rag to make a point. There's stupidity and stupidity. Anyway most poor people aren't stupid, but they soon learn that government programs don't reward them for not being stupid, that being slightly stupid is the way to keep the handouts coming...so they act stupid about things like trying to get work. Grandma Bonnie Peters found some examples of that, a year or two before I started blogging. They said things like "I don't want a job where I'd have to leave my child with strangers all day." GBP said, "You can bring your children to work as long as they stay out of the actual food-handling area," because she was manufacturing food. Or they'd say, "I can't go to work on time because I don't have a car." Maybe they could have walked but GBP said, "I'll take you to work with me in the van." Or they'd say, "I can't stand up and work because I have cramps every month." To me GBP said, "They have cramps because they eat the wrong food," but to them she said, "You don't have to stand up to work on the assembly line." And after all that, in the second week they quit work because they needed to stay on the handouts to get their dental work done. The state of Tennessee wasn't paying to do anyone's dental work right but those poor women would rather let the state provide them with inadequate dental work than work and earn the money to have their dental work done right."
Serena: "You're going to have to do one or the other, some time soon."
PK: "I'll have to scrape up the money, because we are not in Tennessee. My point was that Mr. Kennedy seems to think, because a lot of busybodies have been telling him, that poor people aren't intelligent enough to choose the right food. Well, some of them aren't, but it's not that they spend their food stamps foolishly the same way every month. The ones I've observed wanted to try a few special treat foods that were supposed to taste like something from a fancy restaurant, every month, and that didn't leave enough for a month's supply of rice and beans and peanut butter sandwiches.
Your deliveryman and I got into a conversation, a few years ago by now. He was just making conversation as humans do. He said someone who worked at the store had been ranting, again, as she apparently often did, about the poor people who came into the store. This store is not near us; I don't often go in there, nor know those people, but I know where the store is and expected that the people went into the store to use conveniences like the faucet that's just right for refilling bottles with water, the water-flush toilets, or the quaint old phones, the same way Lisiwayu and I used to do when we were selling junk out of a warehouse near a different convenience store. Anyway the woman who actually kept the store was ranting, "They come in and fill shopping carts with soda pop, chocolate bars, potato chips, and energy drinks, and they pay for it with food stamps. How is that even possible? When my mother was disabled, and she was eighty-some years old, they only ever gave her..." some amount of money that was less than these people were spending, in one day, on junkfood.
I said, "Well, she should talk! They are trying to be good customers, but what can they buy in that store with food stamps? The store sells gas, it sells conveniences like matches and work gloves, and it sells junkfood. What can they buy? Not a dozen eggs! Not a can of beans! Not a sack of potatoes! I don't remember even seeing things like Cheerios or sandwich bread in that store. Do they stock peanut butter? Baloney? Canned fruit?"
I was thinking of the convenience store near the church college I used to attend. We don't have one like that in my town. The one near the college was run by Koreans who had been refugees after the war, and they sold candy and chips and soda pop, of course. But they stocked some fancy local brands of candy and soda pop made with real fruit--for about the same price as the cheaper, junkier kinds. And they sold all of the soy-and-wheat meat analogues Seventh-Day Adventists eat. And they had an oldfashioned vegetable cooler, a device that cooled a whole aisle of fruit and vegetable bins; they filled that bin with fruit and vegetables every day. They bought wholegrain bread from the college bakery, which still existed back then. I don't remember their selling any fresh meat, but they sold milk and eggs. At that kind of convenience store people could choose lots of different things that could be considered healthy food, and that they could even eat on the street, or in a college dorm room. I wish we had a store like that in my town; the old QSQ, and Broadwater's, and Reed's store were like that, but we don't have one of that kind any more.
"Many's the time," I said, "when I've been willing to pay twice what I'd pay at Wal-Mart for the convenience of buying, at a local convenience store, what I buy at Wal-Mart. But it's not often been possible. When I go to Wal-Mart I buy rice, beans, chicken, mackerel, corn, tomatoes, peanuts, onions, garlic, and maybe ice cream or candy for a treat. When I stop at a local convenience store the only 'real food' they're likely to have is the peanuts, and some convenience stores don't even offer good deals on those. It feels as if I'm doing well if I find some kind of candy that has some food value, like M&Ms or those local oatmeal things, and some kind of gluten-free chips. Sometimes these stores don't even have baloney, other than pork. I don't eat wheat bread; a lot of people don't eat wheat bread; often these stores don't sell wheat bread. If they stock anything but candy, chips, pastries, soda pop, and tobacco products, and the non-food conveniences like batteries and sewing kits, they might have one rack with some odd mix of canned soup and canned veg that looks about a week away from being donated to the food bank. And if I can't buy the solid food I cook at your store, or the Addco in Gate City, or Citgo, Valero, BP, or whatever's replaced the Black Diamond store, with cash, how can anybody expect poor people to buy it with food stamps?"
The deliveryman, a nice person, listened to this rant. Then he went with me to Wal-Mart. A few weeks later I was in his store, and saw that an aisle had been stocked with things other than candy, chips, pastries, and soda pop. Those things included the brands of beans, corn, tomatoes, and mackerel that I buy at Wal-Mart. They cost twice as much in a convenience store. I bought some, anyway, that day and whenever I've been in that neighborhood since. I think most of the Addco stores now stock those things. I'm not sure about the bigger chains, and when I've been in the local Citgo store the selection of grown-up food has remained execrable, but from Addco I could get the makings of a decent grown-up meal.
Just making grown-up food available to poor people would improve the food choices some of them make, fast. The Obamas called to public attention, ten or fifteen years ago, the urban "food desert" neighborhoods where people would pay more for very limited selections of prepared food from locally owned snack wagons, or at best from 7-11 or similar junkfood-based convenience stores, because no Safeway or Kroger's or Whole Foods manager dared to go into those neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods used to exist. I think the Obamas may have encouraged some improvements. I hope so. I know that when my husband and I tutored in the DC schools, we were always being warned, "Bring your own lunch--there's not a decent place to buy lunch in the neighborhood," and wondering, "What about the students? Is lack of a decent lunch affecting their ability to learn?" The more promising students brought their lunches, and I knew they didn't just walk out to Giant, as I did, for a perfect piece of fruit and a package of fresh locally-packed nuts. If they had sandwiches and carrot sticks, somebody had spent an hour standing on a crowded Metrobus, holding grocery bags, to get bread and carrots and canned tuna and suchlike to where they lived.
But what if they don't choose grown-up food? Not all poor people are grown-ups, after all. Many are students. All of my Nephews enjoy certain advantages over many of your fellow students. Not the least of these is that you've learned to enjoy, and prepare, grown-up food. As occasional road food Fritos and Mountain Dew may be a better choice for some of us than whole-wheat toast and a sprayed apple would be, but it is a real advantage to have tomato or strawberry plants as your "indoor pets," to know a dozen or so favorites of the thousand known ways to cook dry beans, to know how to stir-fry your own Asian-inspired concoctions without the extra grease. Reading Olivia Graham's cookbooks reminds me how underprepared to feed themselves many of your classmates are. The difference between a Real Brain and a mere nerd is that a Real Brain will cook for friends, and thus teach them to cook, while a mere nerd will sit in the computer room and gloat because his classmates are so far behind him.
Then there are the more pathetic kind of poor people who shop for food, if they still eat food, while suffering from "the munchies" after drug trips. All they want is junkfood. They get brilliant trippy ideas like "Can I eat one of every kind of Little Debbie cookie in one day if I don't eat anything else?" or "What if I buy a box of cake mix, bake a cake, and just eat my way through the cake all day? Oh wait, the electricity's disconnected for non-payment again. What if I just buy a tub of pre-mixed frosting?" Or they look at some food, maybe something uninspiring like a tin of artichoke hearts that seemed like a good idea during the previous day's drug trip, and think, "I don't want food--I want more drugs," and they barter their food for drugs, or drug money.
That kind of poor people, the addicts, are poorer than poor and really do need minders who will make sure they're supplied with nutrients until their brains start ticking over and making reasonable decisions about these things. Most poor people, however, do not need to be insulted by comparing them with addicts. Most poor people cannot be included in very many of the same sentences with addicts.
Many poor people make food choices that seem foolish to busybodies for valid reasons. For example, if they're sensitive to glyphosate, they've learned that totally denatured substitutes-for-food like soda pop, which no one should consider food, are almost glyphosate-free and thus actually healthier than things that used to have some food value, like milk or orange juice.
If they don't know how to cook, or if their trailer house heats up like an oven and everyone feels so hot and cross they're likely to maim anyone who mentions cooking, or if they have only an electric stove and the electricity's disconnected for non-payment, then they buy the junkfood they can eat right out of the package. Nature has provided all kinds of non-junk food that can be eaten right out of the package--apples, oranges, bananas, cherries, strawberries, lettuce, parsley, watercress, spinach, broccoli, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, Vidalia onions, celery...but glyphosate has made it more toxic than some $7-a-dozen gluten-free chocolate-chip cookies, so that's where some people's food stamps go.
If they don't have a kitchen sink, as it might be because they're living in a storage bin or in a car, they'll pick pastries or candies over fresh fruit every time. Pastries and candies can be eaten out of a nice dry wrapper, all crumbs rolled up tight inside the wrapper, the whole thing stuffed into a pocket until it can be thrown away, without attracting vermin or calling attention to the fact that food is being consumed in a storage barn. (Which might call attention to the fact that a person is remaining in the storage barn, sitting very quietly between boxes, after closing time.) Fruit and vegetables might taste better, but the peelings would bring in trails of ants. Some poor people are in fact afraid of rats and roaches. Rich people think all poor people have grown up on intimate terms with rats and roaches; they are wrong. Only the ones who come from federal housing projects are particularly likely to be accustomed to living with rats and roaches.
If they know more about their food tolerances than any flippin' floppin' social worker, they'll reject "healthy" food (for someone else) when it's offered to them and make a meal of junkfood right in the donor's face, because who the BLEEP does this donor think person is, anyway, and by the way this donor's dog is probably the dumbest dog in town, too. You can tell because it stayed with the donor.
And if they're aware of a busybody acting as if they weren't competent to make their own food choices, all bets are off. They feel no real appetite because they're more interested in scoring off the busybody, making person feel stupid, than they are in eating.
In any situation of this kind there is one intelligent thing the person who wants to help can do: SHUT UP AND TRY TO LEARN SOMETHING. Learn, specifically, that when people lose their jobs they do not necessarily lose their minds, and when their homes have been smashed by natural disasters they do not lose the ability, or the desire, to smash the ego--and probably the nose--of people who think that being better off makes them better human beings.
I don't know what any particular individual, rich or poor, ought to eat but I know it ought to be something the person wants to eat, as determined by the person, not by me.
Nor by Mr. Kennedy.
Nor by any of the busybody social workers who've been whinnying for years that the food stamp program is all wrong because it doesn't give them control of what poor people eat."
Serena: "Have you finished? Has any of this anything to do with us at the Cat Sanctuary? Are you planning to buy food with food stamps?"
PK: "No. But when people praise Mr. Kennedy for going after waste, I think of how much food other people have thought I ought to want, and I didn't, so I wasted it. I remember my mother going overboard at the health food store and buying us so many different vitamin pills that my brother and I, who had a rose competition going on that year, quietly took outside and fed to our rosebushes. Then I remember wastes of life like the man who managed to be homeless even in Gate City for a few years, who was skinny because he would hardly ever eat food but only trade it for drugs. There was some chance of him actually eating a "treat" food now and then, but no chance of his eating any of the stale slop that was handed out at the food bank. Letting people eat what they like may be a waste of money in the sense that, if they're going to be wastes of life, the taxpayer pays for the junkfood on which they get sick and then pays for the medicine that keeps them sick longer, but trying to force them to eat what we like is even more of a waste if they're not going to eat it. Or if it's going to make them sicker, anyway, because of glyphosate."
Serena: "Does this have anything at all to do with the cats and dogs?"
PK: "It has this: I asked you whether you'd want to try Kitten Naturals. Your behavior has clearly indicated that you would, so if the prices haven't changed I'll pick that brand the next time I'm in Wal-Mart. If you prefer regular Kitten Chow, I'll get that the next time, and so on."
Here, Gentle Readers, are this week's most appealing photos of adoptable cats and dogs. Most of them will thrive on ordinary Purina kibble, as indicated for their species. Some may need fancier food but there's no need to waste money on super-expensive brands of kibble. Seriously, it'd be cheaper, and probably make more of an impression on your pet, to share whatever you eat that is species-appropriate with your pet.
Zipcode 10101: Sienna and Moonie from NYC
I think somebody didn't realize that "sienna" is a color. Siena a place name, but "sienna" entered the English language first as the name for paint colored by minerals dug at Siena, meaning a yellowish to reddish brown. This cat called Sienna is, if anything, a silvery shade of grey. Anyway, she's a mother cat who's bonded closely with her last remaining kitten. They must be adopted together. Moonie, the kitten, is the darker grey one on the left.
Zipcode 20202: Batwing from South Carolina by way of DC
Batwing has more white fur, and is an older kitten, but he reminds me of Serena's kitten. (The kitten had nothing to say about food because he still "eats" only milk. He's alive and well, quite a little handful, and I'm afraid that just by trying to help him get enough exercise I've become His Human.) Batwing has a real white stripe on his nose instead of a few white hairs, complete white forepaws instead of only white toes, and two white boots instead of one behind. In their sturdy body shape and also apparently in their schedule of bouncing manically about, then coming back to snuggle up to their humans, they're very similar.
Zipcode 30303: Harvey, Not from Atlanta
...is either a very new page, or scammy. But he looks quite a lot like Serena's kitten. No information is available about Harvey.
Zipcode 10101: Amber from NYC
It's not the most informative web page. I don't think they expect Amber to need one. Remember those old photos of the Queen of England with those little dogs scampering around her feet? They were Corgis. Amber is a CORGI. Someone will want her. She has received the sort of royal veterinary care, and no doubt comes with the sort of royal vet bill, proper to a breed that's been associated with the last really great monarch of our era.
Zipcode 20202: Hannah from Texas by way of DC
Hannah is two years old and weighs 50 pounds, a compromise between the usually larger Weimaraner and the usually smaller Staffordshire Terrier. She had puppies; the puppies have been adopted, now it's the mother dog's turn. She is a large, energetic young dog who likes to exercise her human.
Zipcode 30303: Daphne from Atlanta
Her web page indicates that this sub-optimal dog who has a variety of health and behavior issues is in the optimal shelter pet situation. She's in a foster home, will stay there until a permanent home is found, and has had the adoption fee pre-paid.
Though very cute, this eight-year-old, rather pudgy beagle mix suffers from separation anxiety and may panic if she's left at home alone. She also has to eat a special diet. She's learned to sit, stay, walk at heel, and go to bed, but she really wants to be her human's little shadow.
If you can be kind but firm with a sweet, clingy, old-lady beagle, Daphne is for you. She may have seven or more years left to live. Make them good years.
