Category Archives: Bitter and Sweet

July 2, 2019

A family funeral: Generations past and present

Today, our family came together in Page County, Va. at the church where my sister and I (and our parents, and our grandparents, and cousins and aunts and uncles) grew up, for the funeral of my father‘s oldest brother, Bill Modisett. He was a quiet man who loved reading about history and current events. He graduated with a chemistry degree from Bridgewater College in the 1950s and spent most of his life living on the family farm and working at Luray Caverns. His presence was always a quiet and calm one, his smile and laugh a lot like Dad’s.

April 11, 2019

An Extraordinary Cat

We said goodbye to Lucy Tuesday afternoon. She was a musicians’ cat, the cat of my heart, a talkative extrovert who loved the vocalists, flutists, clarinetists, cellists and violinists (including the beginners) who came over to rehearse. She loved Satie, Hindemith, Liszt, Brahms and Debussy, though she could take or leave Bach and Beethoven.

Lucy was adopted more than 15 years ago from the Roanoke Valley SPCA when I just went to look, a lone little black kitten who purred in my arms for a while. I had to leave the next day for a week on a magazine project, and called the SPCA every afternoon to see if she had been adopted (they couldn’t reserve a cat, though I wonder if they did, unofficially, that once); on Friday she was still there, so I canceled my last interview, drove three and half hours home, arrived as they were closing up and adopted her without a litter box to my name. We walked in the house and she immediately knew she was home.