10. Olive Branch

Book Ten

OLIVE BRANCH was written as a memorial. In 2002 alone, which started a kind of family die off, I lost my father George (April), mother Anita (June), and my friend Bart (December). The next year, my cousin Doug died (March) and my Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap (May, within about four days of one another so that we buried them together in the same cemetary where my Grandfather and Grandmother Breeze and my mother are interred). The name of the cemetary in White Cloud, Kansas, in the northeast corner of the state, is called Olive Branch, from whence the image of the dove with the olive branch in its beak came. It also has an additional meaning for the main plot of the book, but I don't intend to spoil the novel here.

The front cover was only recently completed by Anita (she coincidentally has the same first name as my mother). I wanted everything to be reversed, and generally in black and white. So, instead of white space around the front cover box, she made it black. The border on the front cover and the text is white, the presense of all colors.

The book begins with the main RAoF characters attending the funeral service not of my mother the year before but of my aunt and uncle in 2003. I had to gain perspective on her death, so I waited almost a year to write about my feelings. The irony was that my cousin Doug, who was at my mom's funeral, was dead of cancer before the following May. He was only three years older than I, three years younger than I am at the time of this writing. As I have implied, it was a tough year for my family to go through. Since that year, my other uncle, Lloyd, my step mother, Willene, and my cat Sneezer also died. The entire decade was not kind, but fortunately most of them had lived full lives at the time they each left us. Even Sneezer was 21-years-old when I finally had to put him out of his misery from a combination of old age, lack of eating, kidney failure, and possibly a stroke at the very end. I would love to pass from this veil of tears so nobly as he, and I still miss him.

Everyone loved Sneezer, and he was mentioned in more books in the series than any other of my cats, as well as photographed for the back cover shot on HARMONY OF SPHERES. He's the big silver tabby. His normal weight was 17.5 pounds, and at one point before I had to put him on a diet he weighed 23 pounds. When he died he weighed less than six pounds, a frail shadow of his usual self. But he peacefully lay on the living room and dining room carpet during my annual Pride Parade Party the previous June because he liked people, liked being in the midst of people enjoying themselves. Everyone simply stepped around him, and I suspect he had a great time being in the midst of so much human activity. While I adore Pudge and Tabby, no cat can ever replace the Big Sneeze.

P.S.  Again, this cover had to be slightly altered after Anita died.  I think we stayed true to her vision.

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