Dawn is an hour away, but the birds have already started up their morning chorus. I only recognize a handful by their song and have wished, in that futile way we wish we were thinner or taller, that I’d learned them long ago. My inspiration was.
The first tracks were faint, but suggestive. Surely they were too big for a deer, and not neat. Deer leave sharply-defined V-shaped tracks, crisp and undeniable. These were a wider V, softer, and definitely big. But they barely left an imprint on.
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Fast forward a dozen years, and I’m all grown up, living on my own, a thousand miles from my Illinois childhood. March came. Ice and snow. April came. Wind, cold, some snow, weak sun. May, even June, more of the same, mostly minus the snow. (Although, surely we remember having snow in May, right?)
Even June can be stingy with the nice weather. Of course, the bulbs come up, the trees leaf out, the lilacs bloom (though three weeks later than the ones in my Illinois yard) and eventually, spring does arrive. Right now, even though Easter has come and gone, spring is holding off.
That’s it. I’ve got to get a cat. This was the longest stretch my house had been cat-less, more than a year since our last cat, toothless, lovely Smitten, hadn’t returned from her wanderings one morning as she’d done like clock-work for many years.
She was Wally’s cat, a Christmas gift from another D-I-L. He loved that cat. So much that when our vet, Justin Blake, told us she had severe gum disease which was affecting her health and should have all her teeth out, Wally didn’t hesitate. “Let’s do it,” he said to me.