First day home from work in what seems like ages, but was actually more like four months, that a little gray dear isn’t waiting for me.   If I took the car in to work, even if I didn’t see her bounding toward it while I was parking, I eventually came to know she’d be there, sitting on the sidewalk when I walked around the car.   There you are… But occasionally she wasn’t there, and then I’d call to her as I walked toward the steps to the porch.   Clauuudia…Clauuudia… For some reason I got a kick out of pronouncing her name that way.   And I’d see her come running, sometimes from the front yard of one of the the houses across the street, sometimes from a neighbor’s porch.   She’d stop a couple feet from me, tail held high, and talk to me, and I’d walk over and pet her and stroke her and complain that her tail had a few specs of dirt in it again and try to get some of it out, and we’d both walk up the front steps to the porch. She was always there when I came home. Always. Waiting for me. Happy to see me.

I couldn’t help myself…I’m still a bit out of my mind. I called to her as I walked up the steps.   Clauuudia…Clauuudia… But more softly than usual so my neighbors wouldn’t hear and call for the padded wagon.   At least I don’t have to worry about me putting food out for her in the kitchen too, because I gave what I had left that she will never need now to Ben for her brother.

After work I went to Valley View to look for a cat statue for the front yard rock garden I’m going to make for her.   It’ll have to be a rock garden because that spot, where she loved to lounge, gets almost total shade from the Japanese maples in the front yard and I can never get anything to grow there.   I’m going to scatter some of her ashes there when I get them from the pet cemetery, and make a spot for her memory.   Valley View had one decent cat garden statue…it had the right pose and the right attitude to put someone in mind of her, but it had some angel wings on it and that was a bit much. A visitor should know her little spirit had wings without needing to actually see them.   That’ll be the art I put into it.