(It should be noted that, in the summer of 2010, I went to visit Dave in Pittsburgh and he told me we were going to a cat parade and I said, “really??” and he said, “no”. So this will also be a figurative cat parade.)
(written on the bus, as most things are)
We lived for three days in a leafy home with open windows sleeping with limbs entwined on a hill in the north of Baltimore and on the porch there was a tent and meals came together and were eaten and lovingly put away and there was a dog and there were gifts of coffee, gleaming knives, books about cooking, a thermos for two. We walked in a heatscape of sun and relentless storybook clouds that billowed behind painted buildings and everyone said hello, everyone petted the dog. And then it seemed, nearly without warning, I was back on that bridge, alone, standing high above the infrastructure of a charmed city watching my loved ones disappear in opposite directions.
Some of us will go back to our home of open windows to look at the walls, to examine, to consider, to continue nesting. Others of us will drive the long skinny road along the coast and reside, once again, in the tall forest by the water with the smiling dog and the cat who stares. Still others of us are pingponging across and up the eastern seaboard and into the center of Pennslvania in the small black car that once whisked a to-be-cat-blogger over the ridges above the town in November, when it was cold enough to need a blanket, and these of us will once again climb the stairs to the apartment above the street without lights and furniture. I am the one who will take buses and trains, carrying my clothes and provisions heavy on my back, until finally arriving at our room on the fourth floor of a street in Brooklyn, the one with the big tree outside and the little cat inside. It’s strange, unfortunate to be strung like so many beads across this smallish portion of the country, to be near enough to visit in a day’s journey, to hear our voices on the telephone and send our love with paper, but not close enough to touch.
It was a good weekend. Roy was there too.
Madre de Jake finds some meow-velous street art on our pre-tour of Baltimore’s Walls to Walls program. Circa de Edgar Allan Poe.
I couldn’t get close enough to this alley cat, so I settled for my camera’s insufficient zoom instead.
This cat had big eyes for our smiling pup, Shamu.
I smile, and write fondly from my rain-soaked window in Brooklyn, sitting on the cardboard chair with the sheepskin and our little Olive tucked with her head against me. Love for all.
Clockwise, from nearest center: Iggo, Madre, Padre, Royden, Big C, Bearded Companion. Beneath the table: Seamus aka Best Dog in the World
