April (Patreon)

Friends, it's been a minute since my last update.

For those who follow the website, you may have noticed a few new items in the store. In March, I digitized our four songbooks and am now offering downloads of those books for sale. I thought about sprucing them up graphically or maybe adding simplified chord charts, but ultimately decided to put that effort into the songbooks I'll make going forward. I'm starting with Seven Is the Number, which I hope to complete by the end of the month. I'll upload it here first for free, with the hope that maybe some of the guitar players among you can test-drive it and let me know what I missed or where I goofed. Several sets of eyes are always better than one!

I've booked a few new shows for fall and have Harrisburg coming up on 4/19. Early May I'll be in the Pacific Northwest for a quick three-day run. I have kept the touring to a minimum, partly because I was scouting for theater opportunities, but also because of my cats. My foundling, Mr. Brown, who joined us in November, requires meds every 8 hours for his neurogenic bladder. And my aging Ms. Pickles McGee needed pain meds, special foods, and extra attention and buffering, partly because she had no love for the kitten, but also because I saw that she was becoming frail.

This is Pickles loving on the lilac last Friday, March 28, enjoying what we didn't know would be her last garden outing. My sweet girl passed swiftly and softly on Monday 3/31 after a startlingly precipitous decline from kidney disease.

Mr. Brown and I are reeling from the loss and missing her every second. I've kept her pad and warming scarf on the couch and sometimes trick myself into "seeing" her there. Can't bring myself to remove her litter box, her scratcher, or the thin futon I laid in front of her spot on the couch so that I could be near her. Even as I type I imagine her coming up alongside my chair and tapping me on the leg for some love.

I know you know. This is so hard.

Pickles was an old girl but nobody knew how old. She was found traumatized and emaciated in the house where her person had died, and brought to a Vermont shelter in July 2020. She was so angry and cantankerous that she needed to be housed in a separate suite and only had one handler. They even thought she was a boy cat -- they named her Murphy -- because they couldn't get close enough to sex her.

She came home with me seven months later, in Feb 2021. I was deep in grief over Miss Kitty but had space in my home and heart for a hard luck case who needed a soft place to land in their golden years. The challenge of gaining her trust and love would end up being more meaningful and transformative than I can express. But the truth is, she didn't exactly live up to the hype. Yes, she was a swatter till the end in certain settings or with certain people. But I reviewed some video yesterday of us 10 days in, and she's coming to me repeatedly to swipe my fingertips with her cheek with a tail that's swishing joy. I'm obviously tentative because of her backstory, but I didn't need to be. All she wanted was a home, and in the end, it was a privilege of a lifetime to give her the best home I could... though I think she'd say the recent months with Mr. Brown tested her patience, and I wouldn't disagree. They've been kind of hard on us all. (I'm so sorry, Pookers.)

It'll take time to process all of this and get right again. Songbooks seem like a good project for now, and there are still plans for a new album, though I may have a new song to write now, with Pickles making her way...

I am so grateful to you all for your support and good energy. I hope you and yours are well and warm and enjoying the gifts of spring. More soon, I promise. xotg