At home in Kansas, an afternoon in the sun during the strangeness of days
Autumn leaves in shades of red and gold rest on the steps of the author's porch. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
As I write there’s a calico tabby on the porch, asleep in the sun.
It’s an afternoon in early November and the temperature is 65 degrees, says our outdoor thermometer. There is no wind and the atmosphere is so clear it seems distilled by the intensity of late fall. Constitution Street has been made vivid by low sun and dry air.
Even the sky seems more blue.
I don’t know if the cat appreciates this beauty — as I understand it, the scene looks muted and blurry for her — but she lives easy on days like this. Her name is Newt. Don’t ask me how she came by that, but my wife Kim can recount the complicated backstory, as there always is with cats. I don’t know if Newt has her own secret name, as Eliot poetically declared, but today she has no time for meditation on the ineffable. Just rest.
The cat sleeps on a piece of paint-splattered cardboard, but earlier it was the lazy gray cat on the makeshift mat. His name is Geebers and he is even lazier than Newt, although his curiosity draws him inconveniently underfoot. The third cat, the white Foxy One, prefers her own company and is perched atop a plastic trash bin in the back yard.
Have I mentioned I am not a cat person?
The cats have places to sleep, store-bought beds tucked in corners of the deck and the back porch, but they prefer my old T-shirts that have become work rags or the scraps of cardboard that catch paint drips. We still have things to do, so there are brooms and brushes and buckets of stuff on the porch. But largely, the work is done for this fall. Our handyman friend and his wife have done most of it, but I’ve managed rebuilding the steps out front. The handyman’s name is Junior and that reminds me of my dead father, whose given name was Carl but who was called Junior by just about everyone who knew him. Sometimes the handyman friend will forget to bring a tool and he’ll ask to borrow one of mine. It was a level yesterday and I imagine my father would have been pleased when I produced one that he himself had used 30 or 40 years ago.
A few things are left that I can do. A bit more carpentry. Some paint. Maybe repair that leaking gutter on the big round corner of our house that’s been here well over a hundred years. All I need is a few good days and a little ambition.
But who am I kidding?
There will always be things to do. The work is never done.
And that’s OK with the cats.
The cardboard the cats prefer is dappled with the new colors of the house, porch, and deck: yellow, tan, redwood, dark brown. It didn’t occur to me during summer that we had chosen an autumn palette for the house, but it’s apparent now. There’s not much color in the trees in front of our house on Constitution Street, but a block over there’s a maple that fairly burns with red and orange. Kim came back not long ago with photos of it on her phone, an attempt to memorialize fleeting beauty in an ordinary moment. Her photos make me sad for the maple in our back yard we lost to a wind storm last year.
This is the melancholy territory when Halloween is behind us, but it’s not brisk enough to yet imagine Thanksgiving. It’s a lull in battle, a bit of rest before the harshness of winter. It feels like we didn’t have much of a summer, because of the rain, because of projects, because of 2025. The strangeness of days is not just because of the weather.
I’ve linked the personal to the public during this time before. Last year I wrote about our mind-bending cultural landscape. In 2023, I noted my brother’s death and took comfort in Thoreau. But anxiety and uncertainty still rule. We are now in the longest government shutdown in United States history, our military masses off foreign shores, more than 40 million people have already lost their food assistance, and health care for another 20 million may become unaffordable as federal tax benefits expire. There is much more to worry about, but these issues are the most pressing.
Never mind just now who is to blame. When your apartment building (or the house of democracy) is on fire, you work at saving yourself and as many others as you can first, even if you have a good idea who lit the match. If you survive, there’ll be time later to investigate how the fire started. If you don’t survive, there’s no point.
A couple of days ago Kim and I took all the loose change we could find in the house, from jars and pockets and one comically large Jack Daniels bottle, and cashed it all in. We fed the coins into one of those machines at the local grocery store and it clanged like a slot machine and counted more than 90 bucks, including a thousand pennies. We gave half of the amount to a local food bank and used the rest to buy macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and other staples to put in blessing boxes around town. We aren’t hungry, but we know it’s a thin line that separates us from those who are. Our acts are not so much charity as they are an affirmation. We’re still here, we’re mostly okay, we can afford to help others. We do it while we can.
Kim is one of those 20 million Americans who rely on the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act plans, subsidies which are set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts. Her premiums are expected to triple, according to this KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation) calculator. She’s contemplating going without, but that risks catastrophe. Such conversations have been frequent since my job as a professor was taken away in a purge of the humanities in 2022, because Kim was on my health insurance. But many other families, from all professions, are having these discussions. The past three years have been tough, although we managed to survive and are better now. But the health care problem lingers.
The fears many of us had this time last year, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, have materialized into what may become life-or-death decisions. Health care or house payments? Food or rent?
I’ve always tipped too much at restaurants, and in the past the motivation was in that “Sun Also Rises” way of making people happy and getting them to like you, but now is different. I don’t care so much who likes me anymore. But I do care about those who rely on tips.
If the last few years have had any lesson for me, it’s that you can suddenly become disadvantaged by events beyond your control, even if you’ve spent years building what you thought was job security. You’re just one workforce management decision or one major illness away from having it all come crashing down. We’ve been lucky. We held onto our old and admittedly modest home on Constitution Street, but it was not without struggle. The paint and repairs represent for me a victory over the forces of career disruption and economic entropy. The place will never be a model home, but every dab of paint and each driven screw is a testament to tenacity.
The struggle to get by has reached such proportions in America that it should make us all ashamed. When I was a kid it was easier to get by because the cost of doing human business was more straightforward. You paid this much for rent, that much for food, you kept the car running and if you were lucky you had a little left over to buy gasoline and a couple of movie tickets. There are a dozen things you could name that make it more expensive to live now, from your smart phone (required if you want to stay or be employed) or your home computer and internet. We have better health care now, due to advances in technology, but prices have far outstripped general inflation. We also spend more on health care than any other large, wealthy country, but that spending doesn’t translate into better outcomes. Even if you have insurance, you might fear the cost of co-pays for a major illness.
Everybody knows, even if they won’t admit it, that health care in this country is broken. We are trapped in an upward spiral of services and premiums that cannot be sustained. There is a strong correlation between poor physical and mental health and food insecurity, so we’re really talking about different aspects of the same problem. That problem is economic inequality. The United States is experiencing a widening income gap, with an inequality chasm not see since before the stock market crash of 1929.
Will we have another Great Depression?
I don’t know. Maybe.
That’s one of those saving people from the flames first and investigating the arson later questions. We must do what we can right now to relieve the suffering of our friends, our neighbors, and especially people we don’t know. We are naturally disposed to helping family and friends, but helping strangers may be the true test of our humanity. To live in America today is to dwell in a nation of abundance in which 1 of every 8 people is in danger of going hungry.
If you are not among them, give thanks. Your good fortune might be because of your hard work or your family connections or simply good luck. If you are among the 13% who are, don’t believe those who say you’re lazy or otherwise undeserving and chalk it up instead to bad luck.
Poverty in America is a choice, but the choice isn’t made by those it afflicts, and certainly not their children. We have made the collective choice to embrace a system that resembles the worst aspects of our Gilded Age past more than the golden age of mid-century democracy. In today’s America, the only unpardonable sin is being poor.
The last few years have left many of us emotionally battered.
I am so weary as the cat sleeps on the porch that I’m not prepared for a day of sun in autumn to feel like a gift. But it is a gift, and perhaps that’s the lesson for the day. One individual can’t control sweeping cultural events any more than one can control the weather. All one can do is to enjoy the good days, prepare for the bad, and try to help those in danger of being swept away.
I stand for a long time on the porch, looking at the slanting light and the fallen leaves on the steps. I think they’re all maple but the yellow ones are from a gum tree, Kim tells me. She also says Newt’s name is a contraction of “New Cat.” Not mysterious at all, just a convenient name for the third orphaned or otherwise abandoned cat she’s adopted. I reflect for a moment on labels and ponder whether I am disappointed by politics or seriously disaffected. Then the thought passes. I should be painting or cutting lumber, but then the moment would slip away. In time the lazy gray cat ambles sleepily over from where he’d been hidden and looks up at me with wide green eyes.
I reach down and scratch him behind the ears.
Have I told you I’m allergic to cats?
I will have to wash my hands thoroughly later. For the moment, it is enough to feel the back of Geebers’ bony head beneath my fingertips as his eyes close and his tail goes slowly back and forth. The cat has no politics. For the moment, neither do I.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.