I write often and lengthily about just how much I love the people I love. Sometimes I just want to squeeze them until they come apart, keep them talking late into the night or on the telephone, type them little messages as fast as I can until I fall asleep with The X Files on, smile at them in their yellow dresses, bike home along water at 4:00 am, exhilarated and filled with feeling and words, just wanting to say everything while I am saying nothing.

As a wise woman said yesterday, “life just blows and is also so beautiful that I don’t quite know what to do with it”.

And then there are those who give the timeless gift of cats.

from MADRE y PADRE

As part of my graduation gift of wonders, the parents de Jake left me this little meow purse nestled in a bag of jumbie tentacles.

Additionally, they left me with something of Auntie Lauri’s that will certainly come in handy over the coming weeks– M. C. Escher cat thank you cards.

What a thing. I can’t wait!

from HURRICANE BEN

First of all, if you aren’t reading Ben’s excellent metal blog, then perhaps you should start. Last week I was incredibly heartened to see myself featured in a post called Meow Mix, for which Ben compiled A WHOLE NEW cat-themed playlist. (Perhaps you recall our earlier endeavor, right after meeting two years ago.)

Well, I was even more heartened to see Ben later that day, at which point I received a hard copy of the Meow Mix from the world’s coolest teacher/heavy metal aficionado.

My father will be especially glad to know that the last song on Meow Mix is Primus’ “Tommy the Cat”.

Additionally, Ben gave me the book authored by his friend Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing. Since receiving this  book WHICH I WOULD RECOMMEND TO EVERYONE IN THE WORLD PERHAPS I have been reading it quite hungrily, and I remain immensely satisfied that Ben and I were able to see Tim give a reading a couple months ago, at which he shared an essay about his cat life-companion.

Tim Kreider, excellence.

from TYLER

Quinn Daly’s half-Japanese stunt double recently returned to this land of glass and concrete from a long journey over mountains, through jungles. It was my great honor to receive the world’s creepiest/best finger puppet upon his arrival home.

Jake dislikes its eyes, but they are its most charming feature; of this I am certain.

He guards my cookbooks.

from KAT

I am still reeling from the love and support I received from people in the last days of chipping away at my MFA, especially during the week of my thesis show, when loved ones   from various parts of the city, tri-state area, and country streamed through Pratt’s gates to let me hug them forcefully.

However, only one person left pawprints in my sign-in book.

Momcat and Baby Erica at the lake, circa 1988.

Fashionista Babci!

Grandma and JQ are shocked.

Madre and Iggo walk along the beach, 2011.

Mormor and her Girls, 2011.

I am lucky and proud to know these people, be of these people, and to be shaped by them continually. These are ladies of wit and warmth and strength and wisdom.

When we were smaller we would wake very early on Mothers’ Day, walk into the dewy yard to collect the first things that had sprung from the ground, usually fistfuls of grape hyacinths and grass probably, and serve them to our Momcat with breakfast in bed, coffee in the finest cups our mishmash china closet could offer, folded sheets, the bed by the window. I wish I could do the same thing for all of these most excellent mothers today.

Because I am far from you all, 118 miles, 143 miles, 124 miles, 267 miles, and 2,904 miles respectively, I can only offer you this very fine video of a cat on a bicycle with a sombrero that our dear Evan sent in.

With love.

Total of five legs in this picture. 

Yesterday afternoon, the Madre y Padre de Jake drove their little green car from that thin stip of beach in Southern Maryland all the way to Brooklyn, or Mad Max Town if you are my very astute father. In a wonderful twist of fate, the Dead Skeletons, a band they just so happened to connect with in their travels through Iceland last summer, were playing here, just a few miles away. The promise of black and skulls and jewelry made from traded silver was just too great– they had to come.

It is with great happiness that I can report success in the realms of IPAs and tacos and balcony couches and onstage paintings purchased and Roy and Ed and dancing and crouching and city driving and the joy of two of the people I love most.

It is a regular slumber party in Crown Heights this morning; it is another rain day and I am the only one awake. Olive and I were couch sleepers last night.

Speaking of the lady, it has been a year since we brought her home, fighting and biting and punching and yowling in her little cardboard box that she would later bleed all over after she got her toe pad separated by the front door.

To Olive!

From our dear Ed.

Photos de Jake

A gooball in a blue raincoat, adrift, filled to the brim with feelings. FEEEEELINGS.

This morning when I woke the world had filled up with rain and the room was dark and I spilled coffee on my legs looking out the window. Later I drank coffee in the rain under a tree filled with birds with a lap full of orange peels. Now I am having tea and sitting on a blanket of many colors.

The sky is big and grey and the leaves outside my window are somber; they wave in the breeze.

Times a’changin’, times a’changin’.

Here be cats.

from ME

via Boy With Beards With Cats

from JONO

This has taken on a whole new meaning.

from my CAMERA COON

For Bear, she says.

Heart cooks brain.

Almost done.

Tomorrow is my last day of school. At Pratt the trees are heavy with cherry blossoms and the grass and sky are technicolor through open windows. Walking toward the street, through the tall black gate, I wondered if I would remember this day, or if it would dissolve in a flood of experiences.

In any case, here are some cats I’ve seen recently. It has been too long.

via Erin– FAMILY LOVE

Prospect Place, Brooklyn, NY

Recently, Olive has decided that standing where the mugs should go will make us more likely to feed her.

St Marks Avenue, Brooklyn NY– for Ed

A missing kitty in Jim Thorpe, PA

Hoops 4ever, Jim Thorpe, PA

Babci’s Easter Card from the Lovely Cioci Tina

Gato Oven Mitt

Ready to strike.

KILLER

Sleepy buddies.

My Auntie Jo and her stylish glasses.

Scenes from a recent night with Raymond and Parker

From the quilt show at Le Brooklyn Museum

Hiding from the Jumbie.

Gurl is passssed out. Photo credit: Iggo

Summer Dad

To protect John’s car from Kitty.

Everything is coming up circles, these days.

Hurtling toward Huntingdon late last week, late into the night, our headlights found roadside bushes, saw the gentle slope of grassy fields, the panels of weathered houses, too late for any lights to be on. The moon over the ridge, Rt. 22, the smell of the river in that familiar parking lot at 3 am under sky and stars. The train rolled through our dreams all night. We were going to a good man’s funeral.

It is good to be be sad together, Roy said, and he was right. And I realized how lucky we are to be sad together, to hold each other close in the sunshine, lakeside, skipping stones and drinking wine from styrofoam. In all of it– the floor sleeping, the death-metal construction zones, the fog and the sunrise, the smoke from the campfire and the cigarettes in the bar with the jukebox that took all our money and the pooltable glowing old and green in the back, our clothes and hair dirty and smelling of these places and of each other, the wriggling Dinah dog, the country roads and our families who live off of them, a scientific cactus– we are people for whom life is quite beautiful.

There are others to thank for this– to the one who, without question, let us take her green car from the Land of Enchantment to drive many hours here and there, west then east; to the one who stayed up waiting for us with cookies and pizzas, who let us sleep on his floors while he slept elsewhere; to the one who swooped in to watch Olive, songs in his mouth and on his bicycle; to the ones who let us turn off the highways to stay awhile, feeding us sandwiches and seltzer water, letting us play mandolins and yard games; to the ones who met us back at home, bringing tacos and hugs, staying until bedtime.

And, finally, to the one who embodies the strength and warmth of his father– who is a testament to the goodness of people, whose mustache and glasses and wryness and love are a continuation of the ones who came before.

With love for you,
Erica

“His name is kitty.”

It has been so long since I’ve written.

I have wanted to write to you, and I look forward to the continuation of my words, your reading, your words, my reading. It means all of the things to me. Soon.

It is late, and I want to hold you all tight. I want to show you all of the love that has been here all the time. I have been busy, but some days make themselves real, in their wind and sunshine and mid-day phone calls and early evening sun shadows and late night slow dances and the words traded between us that don’t need to be explained.

I am love for you; my love extends.

Erica

For some reason, I thought that once I had my MFA I’d be REALLY SET, like people would just fall over themselves to give me jobs. Thus far this has not happened, though I do have my post-school life sorted out until August. Then it’s just a big question mark. It looks like this:

Resumes, statements of purpose, project descriptions, image lists, burned disks of my short life’s works….yes, I have all of these things and they’re MULTIPLYING like it’s their official mating season and the survival of the species of boring documents depends on it.

Sometimes I imagine what a funny life I’d lead if I won ALL OF THE THINGS and tried to stretch my time between the locations of my various applications. It would mean that next year, so far, I’d be living simultaneously in northern Maine, southern Nebraska, an island in the Long Island Sound, State College, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and that part of Maryland where I’d get to see Jake’s family all the time. Imagine the commute.

But so far I have gotten none of them– in fact, one on that list is officially checked off, so I’m in that funny period of in between, but it’s all in between I am realizing. To this point, I have never lived anywhere or begun any endeavor without thinking of moving, the next part, the next house, the next dome, the next country or town or city or program. This is emblematic of my age, of course– I will turn twenty-five just before summer– but maybe also of my disposition, and what I want my days to look like.

Jake and I have lived in this Brooklyn apartment since September 2011 which is officially the longest I have lived in any one structure since I left my parents’ home in 2006. The number of dwellings I have occupied in the space between 2006 and 2011 is truly appalling, but I’m good at it now, shedding furniture (all but our gift bed and heirloom table) and changing location. Summer in New York is wonderful, gross, sweaty, but wonderful, and our friends routinely make me actually swoon and kiss them, but it is time for me to leave, at least for a little while.

For the summer, there will be archiving for a museum I admire, and trees and a lake and the beginnings of our little house with its salvaged doors and windows on Grossland. This little house will hold our things, and sometimes us. There will be endeavors out west with our families and then we will fetch our cat and we will be tumbleweeds, but we will always come back to see you, all of you. I’m going to make me lonesome when I go, too.

Several months ago, right after we brought Olive into our home, Mike Shea and Christina were over. Upon perusing her ASPCA paperwork, Christina realized that Olive and Parker share a birthday!

It is today.

Happy birthday, Parker! 

“Hobo cat gots a train to catch” -Mike Shea

Happy birthday, Olive!

With wishes for good fortune and a million treats,

The Quinn-Weller-Shea-Wrights