Animal world

Rita is a house cat. She’s not sharp in the way of cats and the outdoors.

But she asks to go outside as clear as anything – she accepts a harness and a leash. She only tends to take a few steps, then she crouches against the ground. The pupils within the irises of her eyes, which are the color of dark yellow mustard, narrow to vertical black slits in the sunshine.

She wanders a little – chews on grass.

Her fur, when I put my face into it, makes me think of Julie Christie in the movie, Dr. Zhivago -the scene in which her glowing ember of a face is enveloped in fur as the sleigh flies over the snow-covered landscape.

Rita’s fur is black and white, and she waddles, svelte in an overweight sort of way. But she touches her smudged nose against yours and for all of that she is not like other cats – she is a glowing ember.

Oshka was the cat I admired in his youth and into his maturity - he could come and go at will, leaping up onto the work bench in the basement, and then, up to the open pane in the basement window – usually covered with a flap of old pant leg to try to keep the wind out, and covered with a board at night to keep Oshka in and other animals out.

Oshka could catch mice and birds – not too often – but he didn’t really understand about not bringing them inside. The robin, fluttering from the molding over the doors and windows toward the light, must not have been the brightest of his species. He finally managed to find the door I opened for him and flew away, with Oshka surely listening to the whole thing from where he was locked in the bathroom.

And the dumb mice – smart enough to play dead long enough once they were caught, then when Oshka would set them down in the living room to survey the situation, they would dart off under the bookshelf or into some other crevasse where Oshka - and we - could not reach.

I am not pleased with how that all worked out on several occasions. Opening a door for the mice was not really an option, so it was them or us. The mice did not understand about not chewing through packaging to get at food or about flush toilets. I buried one not long ago next to where Oshka had been buried a couple of years ago. This mouse had found its own way in and had gotten a broken neck.

Robins have been playing in the gutter outside my window where I write. Rita is alternately dozing and looking at the birds outside the porch window. From where she sits her eyes are likely closed to slits. She likes to at least be close to the outside.

None of us creatures live forever. But it is something to be able to stick my face in Rita’s warm fur and also to think of just how perfectly soft the fur on that poor little mouse was beneath my finger before I laid him in the ground.

Life goes on for some of us a little while longer.