At 11:24 AM EDT on March 21, 2023, in Nazareth, PA, my dear girl Ashes passed peacefully into eternity. We had been together 15 years, with never a cross word between us, a wonderfully close and affectionate relationship. I brought Ashes in off the West Philly streets in 2007, along with two of her kittens, one of the first beneficiaries of Leo’s Cat Rescue, which I ran with my friend John Mignone for over ten years.
It’s been a year since my father died, leaving me my boyhood home, and I am finally ready to make the move! I won’t actually be completely cleared out from my old digs and off that lease until June 1, but Friday, April 3 was the day I chose to transfer focus to the new house in Nazareth. Until then, my base had been Philadelphia, with frequent trips north to prep the new space; now I’ll flip that script, staying mainly in Nazareth while I travel back to Philly to continue final packing. We’ve already done two prior major moves, with one remaining. But the key moment in this protracted process is when I move Ashes, my sweet-cranky tortoiseshell cat, who has been with me 13 years. Where she is, is home! And that date was set for April 3.
As ever with the cosmos, all things are perfect in their timing, and I hadn’t really consulted an ephemeris before I chose the date, relying on the heavens to do its thing. And a chart cast for moving day shows my faith was not misplaced, with the momentous event perfectly portrayed in celestial symmetry.
Frequent readers of this site will doubtless be familiar with my cat Ashes; my sweet-cranky Tortie has been with me 12 years, since I took her and her two kittens in from the street on Halloween 2007. Her children predeceased her, Hallows in 2012 and Samhain just last year, but despite some ongoing health issues and an unfortunate addiction to string, Ashes has held her own. As a stray, I’m not sure how old she is exactly, but at least 14, which puts her at about 73 in human terms, an age when mortality begins to assert itself, and even a simple health crisis can prove deadly.
