A girl named Wednesday.
Wednesday Hellebore — Hella, to those who knew her — was with me through major moves, relationships, and some of the hardest stretches of my life. Fierce, bossy, fearless, and deeply loved. I was her person, and she loved me back: in biscuits, in strange hooting noises from the next room until my "I'm in here!" sent her sprinting onto my lap, in yowls of pride when she fished the hair trap out of the bathtub (it was always somewhere different).
She was a weirdo — rescued from a dumpster as a tiny kitten by my eclectic neighbor and carried to my door in a fanny-pack, then raised by me. How could she not be a little strange?
She ran the household. Half the size of some of the other cats, she kept everyone in line with a swift, soft-pawed wallop upside the head — and they respected her for it. If someone came to the door she would growl (growl!) and rush the window to see who dared trespass. She was never one to sit in the middle of things asking for attention; she watched from the periphery, perched at the top of the stairs, yellow lantern-eyes surveying all, judging all.
In November, a coyote killed her in the alley behind my house. I heard her cries and ran, but I wasn't fast enough. I can only hope it was quick.
The next day I buried her, and made a promise: her life, and her loss, would mean something bigger.
A hellebore is a winter flower — it blooms when nothing else will, in the cold months when everything else has given up. People used to plant them by doorways for protection, and tuck them into burial grounds as a quiet promise that something tender could outlast the dark.
That is who she was.
I've seen too much preventable suffering, neglect, and death in animals simply because nobody stepped in soon enough. I can't fix all of it, and I can't save everyone. But I can do more than nothing.
