At peace x 4

Thin afternoon light, the dishwater kind, filters through these thin lace curtains. There is a thickness of silence, the sleep-inducing kind, hanging heavy over our heads. Only now and again we hear the distant shooshing of a truck out on Fort; it's a comfortable reminder--oh, the luxury!--that today we have no need of the car. We may sleep; we may eat; we may or may not go back to sleep.

If it were summertime, I'd be sitting barefoot on someone's front porch. I'd have a glass of lemonade in one hand, and I'd be shuffling through radio stations with the other. I'd scooch my rocking chair across the wooden boards in endless pursuit of the sun-patch, and the only thing I'd see for miles around would be trees, and sun-baked fields, and maybe a friend's car, far off yet down the road, but quickly approaching. It's that kind of day.

Squinching her eyes shut, and twirling her ears to those trucks beyond the great glass window, Meera curls into a corner of the giant green armchair. (But she'd prefer an outdoor rocker, too, if she could get her paws on one.) With her owl eyes open, they're all I see. With them shut, I notice the milk patch of her mouth, the black outline of her tiny pink nose. It looks like someone used maybe a gel ink, rolling-ball, .07 fine-point Pilot G-2 pen, to draw that line.

Brat lies somnolescent on the couch beside me. At ten-minute intervals he lifts his chin and turns to look at me: a clear and gentle request for a brief chin-stroke. My boy, my thick black carpet of a cat; there could be whole worlds hidden within this mass of fur; I should really brush him out this afternoon.

And Kai, Kai of the turbulent thoughts and upset routines. Little guy is capable of grace; he's deigned to come within two feet of Brat. Though he began at the far end of the couch, balanced on its back, slowly he inched his way forward til he lay elongated stretched & relaxed just behind my head. His back paws to my left, his front paws to my right, his tiny pink nose mere inches from my ear; we are four; we are content.