Today I Will Percolate!

We are fairly new to the cat world. Neither Chris nor I had cats when we were kids. We both grew up with dogs. Elizabeth came into our lives about 5 months ago. Every week Ryan and I spend time at the horse barn while Molly takes her lessons. Miss Debbie, the owner, has a number of barn cats. My kids love all animals. They really don't seem to have a preference to just one kind. In Ryan's eyes "our home is like a zoo." Words taken right from his published essay for all to see. 

But Miss Debbie had a litter of kittens, not from one of her own cats, but from a stray cat. She couldn't keep them. She has four cats of her own already and so she had the kittens in the barn and said that they were up for adoption. Each week we would go back and there would be one less kitten, until there was only one. That last little one was going to the pound if she wasn't adopted. That's how we got Elizabeth. 

Over the last few months, I've gotten to see the differences between cats and dogs. Elizabeth is an observer, she sits and watches. She sits and watches what goes on outside from her cat perch near the window. She sits and watches the fish tank from the kitchen counter. She sits and watches the dogs from the top of a chair in the family room. She's mulling, pondering, thinking, considering, ruminating. She reminds me of the post I read the other day of the lady that picked the word "do" for 2012 because she is "done" mulling things over. It's good to think, study, mull things over, but eventually there needs to be action, eventually you need to "do" something after all that observing.

Thursday is my volunteer day in Molly's classroom. It really is one of my favorite things to do. I work with some of the kids one-on-one with their reading, I read aloud to the class on that day, and while the kids are at lunch, the teacher usually has that busy work for me to do that every teacher never seems to get caught up on: copying, folding, stapling, making booklets. I don't mind this work. My hands are busy, they almost seem to have a mind of their own and then it gives me time to think, to mull things over. Last week I was making flip books in the teacher workroom...fold, fold, staple, staple, fold, fold, staple staple. My hands took over. As I was standing there a sound came from the other side of the counter. It was the coffee machine. Someone must of just turned it on before I came into the room because it started percolating. My hands knew what they were doing fold, fold, staple, staple, but my brain was thinking about the word percolate. What a great sounding word, percolate! I have a book L is for Lollygag: Quirky Words for a Clever Tongue. It's filled with great sounding words, flabbergast, diabolical, and flibbertigibbet just to name a few. These would be great words on a spelling bee. Fold, fold, staple, staple, percolate, fold, fold, staple, staple, percolate. Everything seemed to be in a rhythm. The word percolate is now running through my head. Percolate has two meanings. The first is to pass through a porous substance: filter; ooze; seep; trickle but it also means to become active, lively, spirited; to show activity, movement or life: to grow or spread gradually, germinate. I want to do this. I want to percolate. I want to filter out the bad stuff in my life but I also want to become active, lively and spirited...I want to percolate!

There are times to mull things over...fold, fold, staple, staple, fold, fold, staple, staple...but then we have to become active, lively, and spirited and percolate...fold, fold, staple, staple, PERCOLATE!