When there's still some fight left

This time of year I start looking for signs of winter. Not that I'm excited about it, but I start looking around outside for hints at what's coming. Are there more spiderwebs than usual? Did we get a lot of fog? Are the acorns thick on the ground? I suppose it might make more sense to check weather forecasts online, but honestly I find my old-time ways are probably just as accurate for my purposes. I need the TV weather people to know if a storm is coming tonight; but I often get a sense of a easy winter coming on just by the way nature behaves. Maybe these senses are goosed a little by living in a town that's built an entire festival around a woollybear, the orange and black-striped caterpillar that's the baby stage of an Isabella tiger moth. Legend and lore holds that its bands predicts the coming winter, too. The wider the orange, the harsher the weather. I found my first one of the season hanging at eye level on the screen porch the other day. According to that guy, this winter will be pretty fair. That seems to be the consensus with the acorns so far too. But one must always be careful to take things for granted. The crickets I keep finding in my house have given me pause. According to the way I was raised, that's a sign of a cold winter on the way. Mice getting in the house is always a dead giveaway, too — and that just happened, as well. However, it wasn't this fellow's choice. I've been down to one cat around here since our elderly cat died earlier this summer. Our remaining feline staff member, Man, has been at an odd place since then. He came here with his brother at six weeks old and at 13, he's outlived everybody. He's been keeping his distance. For the first time in his life, he's not sleeping on my bed, or in the house. A fierce hunter, he no longer chases toys or shows interest in backyard fireflies. We've started to talk about him. "He's finally retired," we would say. "Never thought I'd say this, but his fight is gone. He's old and grieving and he's just done for. He's going to just be a fat old house cat now." Almost six weeks passed. Then one day this week I heard him come through the cat door on the screen porch meowing a deep, hearty "pay attention to me" kind of yell. He came through the open door into the kitchen, past my daughter, and on into the living room, wailing the whole time. I was digging through my bag when I turned and looked to see what the fuss was about. Hanging out of his mouth was a mouse, alive and twitching. He was holding it still while yowling the entire time around it, looking me dead in the eye and saying, I swear: "I NEVER SAID I WAS RETIRED." I didn't move, hoping I could keep him from dropping this live and panicked gift. I opted for praise. "That's a good, Man! Look at you! That's a meaty one!" And with that, I swear he nodded, turned around, and took it back through the kitchen, across the porch and out the cat door, vanishing into the yard. That was that. My daughter didn't even see it. I was reminded, again, of how nature does its thing in its own time. The tides do turn. And sometimes I underestimate the fight left in a body that seems too weary. Too downtrodden. Until one day it decides to remind you what it's capable of, all over again. I saw that tide start to turn this week, when the American people, increasingly alarmed by an administration openly seeking to punish its perceived "enemies," raised concerns about free speech when late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended. When Kimmel returned to air Tuesday night — much quicker than imagined, once subscribers rushed to cancel their Disney subscriptions in protest — 6.26 million total viewers turned in. His average viewership is 1.42 million. Those numbers do not include 23 percent of U.S. households where the show was preempted. Another 26 million tuned in on social media platforms. Those numbers are staggering. In an atmosphere in which corporations seem quick to bend at the bellowing of a president to straighten their spine so quickly amid the pushback from consumers seems remarkable. Americans are sure voting with their wallets, even while they worry their votes won't long count for anything in increasingly gerrymandered states. Kimmel gave a long list of thanks to fellow comedians who stood up for him and everyone, even those who aren't fans, who defended his right to speak. "Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can't take a joke," Kimmel said, calling threats to silence comedians "anti-American." He continued: "And he's not stopping. It's not just comedy, he's gunning for journalists, too." Stephen Colbert, who once wryly called himself the "only martyr in late night" after his show was canceled in July three days after he criticized a $16 million deal involving the president, defended his colleague. "We are all Jimmy Kimmel," he said, rolling into a humorous and fiery defense of the First Amendment. He mocked Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr for saying Kimmel's suspension was due to broadcasters rejecting programming that "falls short of community values." "Well you know what my community values are, buster? Freedom of speech," Colbert said. So are mine. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.