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Spoiler: this is sad, but don't worry, the kitten is ok and so is my adult cat. I started writing this post when I was feeling ecstatic over adopting a new kitten. I'll leave what I wrote unedited and then there will be more under the heading THE REST OF THE STORY

Storm the kitten. Also called Stormy, Stormy Kitty, Kitten of Mass Destruction, Entbane, Breaker of Trees. Yes, as soon as he was named, he lived up to his name by breaking a tree. A little one. The mimosa tree seedling I wrote about on this blog, sadly. My second chance seedling. All the mimosa tree seedlings are gone now. I spoke with the gnome and the tree about it and plan to give away seeds when they are ready this winter.

Happy got to experience rain, sunshine, and moonlight on the weekend he died. I spent all day Sunday with him, carrying him around and petting his beautiful black fur with its thick, light gray undercoat, and white spots on the neck and belly. Coincidentally it was the day Catholics dedicate to their cat saint, so when I lay in bed petting my napping kitty and checked social media there were an unusually large number of cat related posts. I spent a lot of my time speaking softly to Happy. I also internally spoke with Freya. She told me I couldn’t save him, and that she would welcome him to her field and her home.

That evening, he was in my bed and meowed for me to do something. I was not sure what. I carried him to his water; he didn’t want water. I carried him to his food; he didn’t want food. I carried him onto the back porch. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the moon. The white spot on his belly nearly glowed in the moonlight. I let him sit in the moonlight and checked back on him later, and discovered he had made it back inside the cat door by himself, and camped just inside the flap. When I picked him up I noticed the tip of his tail was wet. He got to trail his tail in the pool one last time, which he loved to do. He had made it all the way out to the pool deck and back, but now he was ready to be carried again. I put him back in my bed and curled up around him. I petted him and we fell asleep. He died in the morning before I woke up.

About a week after my housemate wished for her own cat, this cat appeared. When I first saw him he was on the front walkway, and I snapped this photo thinking he would probably walk away after that. Nope. He walked right into the house and made himself at home. 

This is amazing because my cat Happy usually runs off any other cats that enter his territory. He usually hides from strange people and dogs, too. Anything rat-sized is dinner, of course. But Happy tolerated this new cat. He only got hissy when the new cat jumped up on the bed where Happy and I were sleeping. Otherwise he was remarkably laid-back about the whole other cat thing. It's like magic. It IS magic. Freya magic.

For a couples of hours one day this year, I needed to be beautiful. Of course I did all the usual beauty things like putting on makeup and so forth but that wouldn't get me as far as I needed to go. I needed to be beyond beautiful; I needed to be glamorous. 

Glamor is magic. It's not a coincidence that it's both a word for a certain sophisticated sort of beauty and also a word for the innate shape changing magic of the fae. 

Before Tom's funeral sumbel, when I was arranging various statuary on the porch, I unpacked several boxes of Tom's religious items which I had packed at his house. I couldn't find the blue Freyr statue. A few weeks later there was a slight adjustment to the timeline. Then I found the blue statue, but it was Freya. Definitely had boobs. It also had a thick layer of dust, which I tried to wash off and discovered the blue was paint that just washed right off. I washed it until it turned into this, the design standing out in high relief. Then I thought, "Oh oh, I washed the goddess. The slaves of Nerthus who washed the goddess got drowned in a lake. Please don't drown me in a lake. Or the pool. Or..." To which the goddess replied that she would not drown me and I already survived drowning in the pool. Which was true, but I never thought of it that way. I fell in an aging but relatively able woman and came out an athritic old crone, so, I guess that was my shamanic near-death experience? Hmm. It didn't seem very spiritual and I'm pretty sure all I really experienced was fear. But anyway, here's my new Freya statue. To be handled with gloves on only because that blue stuff still comes off on everything.

See the image on this link because I can't upload pics to my blog right now for an unknown reason:

In the Fireverse, Freya’s big house Sessrumnir has the same characteristic as Frigga’s house in that both of the houses can generate whatever sort of room is needed at the moment, with whatever sort of décor and furnishings, while still having some permanent areas. Most of the cats live in the field with the warriors, but some of them live in the house.

Even though the name of Freya’s house means “many rooms” and traditionally all the dead that go to a particular god go inside the god’s house or the building set aside for them (such as Valhalla), in the Fireverse, Freya’s legion of warriors camp in the field of Folkvangr, between Freya’s house and the main road of Asgard. Freya’s army is not meant to be used at Ragnarok, but to survive Ragnarok and help build the new world. She doesn’t have her entire army train every day the way Odin’s warriors do, but some of her warriors do choose to battle each other as training. There are also combat sports contests such as jousting tournaments, occasionally. Freya’s warriors can choose to participate in such contests or not. As a nation-building army, not all the members of her army are combat oriented, even though they all died in battle just like Odin’s warriors.