Hugh's Blog

Kittens – the origin story

Last year I took a couple of non-fiction writing classes from Janisse Ray, which I highly recommend doing. One of the assignments was to write a five-part essay.

I wrote about rescuing kittens, which is, if you don’t know, a thing we do. This is the first section.

I also want to say that I was only able to take those classes because of the membership team that supports my work. They pay a bit each month as a form of patronage, which enables me to not have to put ads all over my website or set up affiliate deals or pump out sponsored posts. In exchange, they get first dibs on lots of things, like member-only sales, writing that was just for them (on average, two essays a month) and more. They first saw this essay shortly after it was written last year.

If you like my stuff and want to see more of it, the best and most impactful way to support my work is to become a member. You can learn more here. Thanks! – HH

It had been a lovely tree, with a multi-trunked base that spread its limbs wide. In the fall, its brilliant red leaves were perfectly framed in our bedroom window. But alas, it was a Bradford Pear, an invasive tree that is spreading throughout our southern woodlands and destroying native habitat. Worse in the near term for me was that it is fragile, dropping huge limbs at every storm, and it had had to come down.

I had chopped it at 6 feet and then girdled the stump, so the trunk could slowly decay and thus feed the tiny critters in the yard, as well as the birds that delight in meals of tiny critters. The spreading trunks formed a perfect pocket at ground level, much the way your hand would if it were holding a ball by your fingertips.

But that had been a few years ago, and now the stump was covered in Virginia Creeper, which also turns red in the fall, and created nesting and hiding space for the tiny woodland creatures that live in my yard.

On this particular May morning, the sky was blue, the humidity was low, and the air was filled with birdsong as they let each other know they had made it through the night. Even though it was time for me to leave for work, I lingered on my morning walk around the yard. We get so few perfect days to be outside here, it felt irresponsible to not enjoy as much of this one as I was able.

It was then I heard it. During a lull in birdsong, I heard a rustle in the underbrush near the pear stump, and then I saw Calico peering out of the Creeper, between the trunks.

Calico is one of half a dozen stray and feral cats that we see in our neighborhood, a collection of 70 year old ranch houses on heavily wooded lots on the north side of Jackson. As people have moved away and abandoned their pets, their descendants now run wild in a local colony, relying on the kindness of strangers and their own wits to survive.

We have given them functional names, mostly descriptive in nature, so we can keep track of them. We have Calico, Tortie, Garfield, and Big Tom, as examples. They are grateful for our feeding them on our back deck, and when we are tardy with he morning meals, they peer in the sliding glass door to our living room, to make sure we are OK, and are aware they are waiting on their daily bread.

However grateful they may be, it is rare you can get within a few feet of one of them, and here Calico was, watching me, frozen, realizing she had made too much noise as I was walking past, and now she must decide how to play this. I squatted, to be at eye level, and she bolted to a clump of shrubs 20 feet away, but then focused her death stare back at me.

I peered in the pocket formed by the dead trunks and saw why – inside the nest were six tiny kittens, less than 3 days old. They were a panoply of colors seen in our local colony – two tuxedo cats, two tortoise shell, a ginger, and one perfect calico.

Immediately I knew that I had a problem.

My problem – well, my immediate problem – was not that these six adorable kittens in our backyard that, if they survived, would double the size of our colony, would wreck havoc on our songbird population, and would be pumping out kittens themselves before fall. While all of that was true, my immediate problem was my wife, Renee.

She loves animals of all sorts, strongly preferring them to people. I once asked her why, and she explained to me, in tones that would suggest I am an idiot, that no animal had ever hurt her on purpose, and that was not true of humans, and so it was clear to her where she should invest her time.

Were I were to force her to choose between me and six kittens, I am not sure the deal would turn in my direction. I am definitely not in any mood to test that scenario.

I know that when I tell her about these kittens, she will want to save them, to make sure they are cared for, that they go to good homes. I can see it all playing out in front of us – our summer vacation dashed, the constant attention, the additional cost. Our sixteen year old grey tabby Felix was in the process of slowly dying, and the vet bills were mounting. If I went inside and told her, my goose was cooked. The smart thing was to ignore them and go to work.

But for 18 years I have found it difficult to lie to her, to look her in the eye and not tell her something she would want or need to know. It is possible I could get away with it, and these kittens could grow and be weened and then I would act surprised along with her when “new” cats showed up at the sliding glass door in late summer. However, I do not want to get away with it, do not want to deprive her of the joy she will get from these kittens, and do not want to ever lie to her.

I peer at the little kittens once more, and then slowly stand, my 52 year old knees resisting the movement. I look at the house, then back at the kittens, and then with a sigh of resignation, begin walking toward the house.

Thunk

When I was a small boy, my dad drove a red Ford pick-up truck, a ragged out work truck we had bought from his employer when they decided to upgrade. I remember it vividly – the split in the seat with foam poking out, the cracked dash, the black vinyl floor mats.

But they say the age of nostalgia is 12, and that is surely true for me. Because by the time I was 12, my Dad had a company truck that came with his job, and it was a white Ford with a blue interior. It’s the truck I remember best.

I can, even 42 years later, remember the smell of it, a combination of Dad and dirt and a slight mustiness that came from the heat and the humidity. But the thing I most remember is the parking brake.

Dad always set the parking brake, wherever he parked. It was a habit, and one he encouraged. Because, he told me, “if you always set it, you never have to remember to set it. It just happens.” Or, as Cory Doctorow once said, habits are things you get for free.

And because Dad always set the parking brake, before you could go anywhere, you had to release it.

At the time, my dad worked for a local propane company, where he was the branch manager. And with the job came not only the truck, but many keys – the keys to the building, the tool room, his office, the shed out back, the garage where they repaired the trucks… so many keys.

One day when I was maybe eight or nine, I asked Dad why he had so many keys. He told me that each key represented a responsibility he had.

He had a giant keyring he carried on a clip on his belt that jangled when he walked and had another, larger keyring with more seldom used keys on a ring clipped to the emergency brake handle on his truck.

And every time we went anywhere in his truck, before you could move at all, you had to release the parking brake. The parking brake in his Ford was a pedal you pushed down, that ratcheted as it went – tic, tic, tic real fast. And it released by a t-shaped handle you pulled, which released the brake all at once with a metallic “thunk!”. But because the keys were clipped to the handle, the thunk was accompanied by a jangle of keys.

This morning, I got in my white Ford truck, started it, and pulled the parking brake release t-handle. It sounded its metallic thunk, like it always does, but this time, for some reason, I noticed the lack of the jangling keys – a sound, mind you, I have not heard since 1990.

Next month will be six years since my dad died. Maybe that was it, or maybe it just hit me at the right time, but 10 minutes later, when I had quit weeping at that memory, I put the truck in reverse and headed out, to start my day.

On specialization

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

I have, at various times in my life, read books and articles on how to be an internet writer. In days past, we would have called this person a blogger, but for most of the last 11 years I am best known for my newsletter, and the blog has gotten scraps. And now all the cool kids are on Substack. But at the end of the day, it’s still just writing on the internet.

Anyway, there is lots of advice out there about how to “build a platform” and “build a brand” and “increase your readership.” And the single most common piece of advice you will get – hell, that I have gotten — was to stick to a niche.

I am sure this is good advice. And yet, I am constitutionally incapable of doing it.

For years, I write heavily about homelessness to promote a nonprofit I was running. I saw it as part of my job, but the whole time I was doing that, I also blogged and ran a newsletter. It would have been smarter to have only written about homelessness, or maybe even expanded to writing about poverty.

But I also want to write about gardening. And nature. And food. And memories. And hope and fidelity to purpose. Maybe some spirituality thrown in for good measure.

There is no section in the bookstore for nature – food – urban poverty – spirituality writers.

I put out a book at the beginning of the year, and it too is a hyphenated book a memoir -cookbook. If I was smart, I would only write about food, but that idea bores me to tears. See also spirituality or nature or gardening.

Part of it is my ADHD, I’m sure. I want to write about whatever I’m excited about at the moment, because writing is one of my ways of thinking. And when I am not excited about something, writing about it is exhausting.

But it cuts the other way too. I am a person who is generally interested in gardening. I own in excess of 150 books on gardening and horticulture. I have a half-acre lot filled with plants I put there on purpose. And sometimes, I am awash in the glories of my garden and yard, filled with butterflies and native bees and flowers and old roses and so many things.

But early this year, I fell into a depressive episode that held me in its clutches and would not let go. Not for love or money could I be convinced to care about my yard. Cutting the grass often enough to not piss off the neighbors was the upper limit of my care. If writing about my garden was my niche and I had readers who depended on me to write about gardening, I would be destitute at the moment.

But instead, I write about lots of things, and I do it well enough that some people stick around to see what I am going to write about next. It does make it damned awkward when you are asked what you do, and you say you are a writer and the next question is, inevitably: What do you write about?

Hell if I know. I’ve been writing online for almost 25 years now, so if I have not figured it out by now, the odds are against my figuring it out.

In any event, If you are reading this, I guess you are OK with my not having it figured out. So, thanks for that. Really. It means more than you know.

The roses persist, and so do I.

I’ve been struggling with low-level depression for most of this year. Just doing the bare minimum of self-care has been a struggle. It’s effect on me has been exacerbated by a big cut in income I have experienced this year, and the loss of health insurance which prevents me from having access to mental health meds.

Also, it is so, so hot here. I haven’t built anything in my workshop in over a month, because it is in the 90’s in my workshop all the time. I haven’t been on one of my long walks in over a month because of the heat. This is circular, because one of the most effective ways for me to stave off the effects of depression is to go for long walks in nature (walking in the suburban mall doesn’t work the same way – I’ve tried).

The big cut in income brings its own problems, of course, but the depression means you just do not have the energy to do the things you need to do to deal. I learned last week that one of my contracts is being cut in half. I don’t have the energy to freak out, but my brain really wants to. My car needs some expensive brake work, so I’ve parked it until I find some money, and instead am driving my very reliable 25 year old work truck, which is amazing except the air conditioning does not really work (have I mentioned how hot it is here?). I have no energy to work on any of this.

Everything is made harder when you are depressed.

Meanwhile, my antique roses are doing great.

Antique roses are those introduced to market before the introduction of hybrid tea roses in 1867. Antique roses tend to be bulletproof, because they were popular before disease fighting spraying regimes were really a thing. Back then, roses that couldn’t fight off disease just died.

I have a bunch of roses in my yard. Most of them are antiques. And right now it’s 98.8 degrees outside, with a heat index of 110, and my roses are just blooming up a storm. In August, in the middle of Mississippi.

I guess roses don’t get depressed.

Actually, the heat does stress them, but they keep going. They are resilient in the face of stress, not immune to it.

Talk about goals.

Reimagine resilience

I have always liked Victor Havel’s declaration that hope is an orientation of the spirit.

For years, my blog’s tagline has been “Hopeful in spite of the facts,” and that is sort of what I’m getting at – hope isn’t dependent on facts, but on your orientation. And a key component of that orientation, for me anyway, is the decision, made in advance, that you will do all you can to make it to that day when the world as it is becomes the world as it ought to be. I cannot guarantee I will be there for it, but I want to deserve to be there.

And that requires resilience. And resilience is made up, more than anything else, of practices.

There are different ways we humans connect with that which is more than us. Some people feel the infinite in music and song. Others know transcendence in their bodies. Some people respond to the holy in visual art, or aesthetics.

Me? I’m a word guy. I believe in the power of words to change the world. I recognize it is not the only way, but it is my way. When I was interviewed for my friend Kathy Escobar’s podcast last fall, I made a slide show of five different prose quotes that have shaped me and added to my resilience, and I shared the story behind them, and how I came to them.

I think about resilience, and things that overlap it, a lot. I have done so ever since the late 00’s, when I was on the edge of burnout and reached out to Bart Campolo, who would eventually become a sort of mentor to me, but at the time was just a name I knew from the internet. His advice, and friendship, would change my life as well as my career. Or perhaps those two changes are not inseparable.

Earlier this year, I did a recording for a (different) podcast that didn’t end up airing about resilience. In it. I talked about the practical side of physical resilience—things like having both electric and gas heating in my house, and several weeks worth of food in my pantry, and knowing who on my street is the cook or the nurse.

I find that physical resilience makes mental resilience easier to achieve. After all, like my hero and fellow Mississippian Fannie Lou Hammer said, if you have 400 quarts of soup put up in your pantry, nobody gets to tell you what to do. You sleep easier, knowing you have more options, more control, and more likelihood of weathering what storms may come.

My phlox is laughing at this heat.

But I am not.

It’s hot here.

I know, I know. I live in Mississippi, and it’s August. What do you expect?

Actually, most summers are not horrible here. There are usually enough thunderstorms and cloud cover to keep it from getting too hot for too long – most days are around 90 to 93. It IS humid here, but it means we have depths of green in our landscape that are only dreamt of elsewhere.

But this summer is brutal.

The heat index here has been over 100 for weeks. The last few days the actual temperature has been over 100. And what’s worse, the nighttime temps have been hot as well – this morning at 5:30 when I got up, it was 80 degrees outside.

When it’s that hot, nothing gets a chance to recover, including us. Our house is going to be 78 degrees inside by 4PM, with the AC running full blast. It just can’t keep up.

We desperately need rain, too. It hasn’t rained any significant amount in almost six weeks. Even the most drought resistant shrubs in my yard are looking peaked. We are, in short, miserable. We are all miserable.

We had a severe drought in 2024, and it weakened lots of pine trees, which were then more susceptible to southern pine beetles. There are now dead pine snags all over Jackson in testimony to the drought of 2024.

I have 7 pine trees on my property that all survived the 2024 drought. I hope they survive this one, too. Hell, I hope I survive it.

I’m always attracted to the flowers that seem to thrive despite the harsh weather. Like the phlox in the front yard – paniculata, I think. I grabbed several of them last year at a native plant sale. There was no editing on that photo up top – it really is that rich and vibrant in the midst of no water or care for six weeks.

This is one reason to grow native plants – they have evolved over generations to be able to thrive here. It draws in hummingbirds and bees and butterflies, and it comes back reliably year after year.

I have just talked myself into growing more of that for next year. My existing clumps are not yet big enough to divide, but I think it’s easy to grow from seed.

The search for the perfect pair of pants.

I am not a vain man, at least when it comes to clothes. I wear a uniform of sorts – most days it’s jean-cut chino pants and a t-shirt in the summer, and a sweat shirt or hoodie in the winter.

There is a dress version of the uniform, where I wear the same pants and a blue oxford button down and a blazer. I like to not think about my clothes.

But man do I feel David Lynch here. I think way too much about my pants – currently my favorite are these, which I would rate as a 8 out of ten.

I am searching for a good pair of pants. I never found a pair of pants that I just love. I like comfortable pants and clothes I can work in, that I feel comfortable in. I don’t really like to get dressed up. I like to wear the same thing every day and feel comfortable. It’s a fit, it’s a certain kind of feeling, and if they’re not right, which they never are, it’s a sadness. You know, it interrupts the flow of happiness. I’m working on it, believe me.

—David Lynch, GQ, 2021

(via Matt Thomas)

Mepkin Abbey

In August of 2010, I spent a week at a silent retreat at Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist Monastery in South Carolina.

I was in the midst of a time of discernment. I was so broke and scared and newly married. I would pray with the monks 7 times a day and eat with them in silence, and the rest of the time I just walked the grounds, or would read in my room during the heat of the day. I had zero cell phone reception.

The Monks chant their prayers from the Grail translation of the Psalms. And in every service, they would chant from Psalm 70:

“O God, come to my assistance;

O LORD, make haste to help me!”

It became a mantra of sorts for me that week, as I walked for hours and hours in silence.

Literally a week doesn’t go by that I don’t think about that experience. And there is a part of me that eternally yearns to go back.

What I don’t know how to do.

There are people out there who like my writing. Who love it, actually. I have more than 200 folks who actually send me money every month just so I have time to write more. My open rates for my emails hover around 60%. I’ve sold dozens of 5 packs of my book to folks who love it and want to give it as gifts.

I’m not for everyone. But the people who I am for connect deeply with what I write. I get people who send me pictures of their cats and kids, who send me unsolicited Venmo payments for my birthday or when I post we are going out to eat for our anniversary. People send me pictures ALL THE TIME of what they made from one of my recipes.

I guess what I am saying is that I have deeply loyal, connected fans, for want of a better word. And that is a huge gift, for which I am deeply grateful. I feel like I have the writing part down. I’m a good storyteller. As Dizzy Dean is alleged to have said, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.

What I do not know how to do is to find more of those people.

Of the billions of people on the planet who do not subscribe to my newsletter, read my book, or listen to my podcast, the number one reason for that is because they have no idea that material exists. It’s not that they are rejecting me, or my writing or my delivery or my values: It’s that they do not know who I am. My biggest problem is not talent–it’s obscurity.

The world is a hard place. Forces conspire to take away our freedom, our agency, and our joy. Oligarchs pit us against each other, and make money off our fear of our neighbor. So what do we do about that?

There are many answers. Some of us protest. Some of us build community. Some of us hunker down. Some of us pray. Some of us teach others skills.

I write. Like Fionna Apple said in the early days of the pandemic, when she released her album Fetch The Bolt Cutters, this is what I know how to do.

I know how to write hopefully. To tell stories that connect us to who we are, or at least who we want to be. To tell you a story that will give you a moment of respite from the horrors of the world. To help you see the world from a different point of view. To give you language for a different way to be in the world.

I know I know how to do that because those are the words people tell me when they write me.

I know how to do that. I just wish I knew how to do that for more people.