Newsletter – September 19, 2025
Man’s greatest fear is the fear of the unknown.
Our daughter and her husband stayed with us recently on their way to her ten year high school reunion. They stayed in the bedroom downstairs which requires them to pass by the doorway to my unlit office on their way to the bathroom. She asked if I minded her shutting the door. Not at all! I was instantly reminded of the heebie-jeebies I used to get passing a dark staircase on my way to bed.
The picture above looks like a large but cozy old home and it was—during the day. It was built in 1303 as a home for the clergy of the Canterbury Cathedral. My family was renting rooms on the corner of the top left staircase while my dad was on sabbatical leave in England.
Leaving the living room to go to our bedroom, my brothers and I had to pass that wide black opening into the dark Great Hall that seemed to echo the sounds of ghostly spirits from centuries past. My English playmates confidently told me about the woman whose baby fell down that old wooden staircase to land on the stone steps at the bottom and die. They said her spirit had been seen walking down the staircase, bloody baby in her arms, weeping and wailing at the loss of her little one.
If the fear of an ancient ghost mourning her child’s death isn’t enough to make you hurry past an empty doorway, I don’t know what is!
I had another heart-pounding experience much more recently.
Our outdoor cat, Tabitha, the mother of at least three litters, showed up the other day with something hanging from under her tail, something that looked like raw meat. And when she sat to eat from the food bowl she left behind a bloody stain on our deck.
To add to the complication, she just became un-pregnant again about two weeks ago and we don’t know where she’s keeping her little ones. We set up the humane trap to capture her and take her to the vet, knowing they might keep her overnight, maybe longer.
Who will nurse those kittens? Who will nurse them if she dies of an infection? Will we get her safely to the vet, or will she fight us tooth-and-nail? So many unknowns.
I was standing at the sliding glass doors when Tabitha approached the cage, went inside and started eating the food.
My heart was beating a hundred miles an hour, my adrenaline energy was topped out. She just needed to step on that metal plate to trigger the door and we’d be off to the races! Even as I type this, my hands are shaking once again.
That streetwise Tabby ate the food and backed out of the cage without ever triggering the capture!
The unknown haunts us still.
Will we need to drop everything when she comes back and DOES step on the plate? Will she succumb to whatever it is under her tail? Will we have to search the neighborhood and the surrounding woods to locate the hungry kittens?
Those are very real questions based on very possible consequences, and the primitive brain feels more than a little panicky about the fear of the unknown.
[PHOTO CREDIT: Strutt & Parker Real Estate]
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Eric Margerum 