The White Cloud Cat

I'm not what you'd call an easy airline passenger; I really have to want to go somewhere to get on a plane and go. Yesterday's flight home should have been smooth as a whistle, but the pilot did battle with cloud stuff on the forever landing, and it took me hours afterward to be able to look up and not see a listing horizon, a crooked screen. I answered all my work email, made some calls, did a few things that were necessary, then collapsed, with my husband, to watch more old Mad Men.

My eyes drifted, at one point, to the deck, where I thought I saw this pure white cat, its one eye green, its other blue. Thought I saw. Looked again. Did see. Patient, it waited. Matter of fact, it stared. As if it were early for a scheduled one-on-one. "Are you really there?" I asked it—the same question I'd posed to that shoreline shark just a few days before. How long will she stay? I asked myself. I opened the door and brushed her head with my hand, touched her nose, told her a story. She stayed. She waited. Said not a word.

She settled in. She put one paw beneath the other and took up her Cleopatra pose. She wore no collar and I was sure that I'd never seen her before, but it seemed that she'd seen me. That she knew me. That I was someone who needed a bit of watching over, guardianship, wings. So she stayed, she waited. She asked for nothing, said not a word.