Today's Holidays: Love Your Pet Day, Cherry Pie Day, Handcuff Day, and International Pipe Smoking Day
Website of the Day: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/cherry-pie-recipe-1913275
Fact of the Day: Cherry pie is the 5th most popular pie in the US!
A few weeks ago I faced timed my family, and it had been a while since I saw them. As I was talking with my mom, she said that Lily (my cat) wanted to say hi. And of course I knew that Lily didn’t really want to say hi/know who my mom was talking to, but I played along with it anyway. Yet little did I know that Lily actually did recognize my voice! My mom flipped the camera towards Lily and Lily ran up to the screen and touched it with her nose. Lily loves me! She misses me! I thought as she rubbed her face on the phone.
A week or so after, I went home and I brought this moment up to my mom. I told her how crazy it was that Lily actually heard my voice and recognized me through the phone. I was feeling pretty special, until my mom informed me that what actually happened was my dad was standing behind the phone, motioning for Lily to come in his direction so that I would think that she was coming to say hello to me. After that I didn’t feel as special.
Even though Lily didn’t run to greet me on the phone, I like to think that we do have a special connection. Whenever I come home from college, she sleeps at the foot of my bed the first night I’m home. When I’m sad, she seems to notice and comfort me. Lily can hear the garage door and knows when someone is coming home, and she’s always there to greet me. We’ve spent so many rainy days together, me reading on the couch and her sitting next to me, as well as countless afternoons after school, me doing homework at the kitchen table and her sitting on the kitchen table beside me (that is until my mom would come home and kick her off “the table that we eat on”). Lily knows that I’m the only one who lets her sit on the kitchen table and the only one who gives her a lick of butter in the morning when I’m eating toast or a bagel or an english muffin. She’ll either jump up on the kitchen island, if she’s really hungry, or wait patiently by my seat for the butter. While some say she’s only nice when she wants food or comment on her apparent “fatness”, I know that Lily loves me for more than the fact that I feed her, and while she is a bit overweight, she is still beautiful.
Now at this point you may be thinking that I’m in love with my cat. I can assure you that this is not- actually, this is definitely the case. But aren’t we all in love with our pets? Our pets are a part of our family. They’re our friends, confidents, and siblings- taking on so many roles and having such an effect, absent of verbal communication. It’s interesting how we connect to our pets in such a way, simply through physical and emotional communication. As humans, we rely on verbal communication, and yet we have formed a type of language between us and our pets that is special in its own way.
Sometimes I look at Bear (I call Lily “Bear” sometimes) and just think of how wondrous and even weird it is that we just have animals living in our homes. Bear prances around the house, actually a more accurate depiction is a slow walk, given she is typically either waking up from a nap or has just finished a meal, and she just goes about her day within the confines our our home. Our home is her world. We are her world. And so she loves us dearly, because we are who she has in this world.
They’re something so beautifully unique about our relationship to pets. When I watched the music video for Marshmello’s Happier (Which if you don’t know is about a girl and her golden retriever. The girl doesn’t have many friends and gets bullied in school, but her dog is always there for her. At the end, her dog dies, but then the video skips to when the girl is a mom, and she gets her daughter a golden retriever for her birthday) I cried my eyes out. Something came over me, and I just could not stop crying. I’ve always had a sensitivity to movies, shows, or music videos with pets, like Marley & Me or Air Bud. Why is it that I could barely breathe as I watched the music video for Happier? While my reaction may have been a bit dramatic, it speaks to the degree of intimacy and connection that we develop with our pets, and with pets in general. They evoke particularly strong emotions in us of love, happiness, and affection that are different from those we share with humans.
I also sometimes wonder is Bear realizes that she is different from us. Does she recognize that she has fur and we don’t? Does she know that she has a tail and we don’t? Does she notice that we can make food for ourselves, while she has to wait for us to feed her? I asked my dad this, and he said that Lily probably thinks she’s one of us, and just wonders why she’s so much smaller. He joked that Lily thinks: Why’d I have to be born so much smaller? This isn't fair! But it’s intriguing how our pets likely think they’re one of us, just as we, even though we recognize that they are animals and we are a human, see them as one us as well. Just as we are their world, they are our world. Yes, of course we go out into the real world. We form relationships beyond the context of the home. But when we return back home, at the end of the day or when we come back from college or when we visit from somewhere else, are pets are there, at the door, excitedly waiting to greet us.
And we say hello, maybe pet them or hug them, and resume our relationship exactly where it last left off. Because our love for our pet is unconditional, just like family, and unconditional love is always something to be treasured, protected, and appreciated. Today, even though I’m at college, I’m going to celebrate Love Your Pet Day by face timing Bear again. Maybe this time she’ll run to the phone for me, and not because my dad is motioning for her to come over. Or maybe not. Either way, today I celebrate my Bear, and I hope that you enjoyed the plethora of pictures of her throughout this post!
Happy Love Your Pet Day! How did you celebrate? Comment below or DM a picture to @officialoneholiday insta account! #BeHappy #Cats #LoveYourPet #Celebrate