early evening

She comes home and we share kisses and poems and conversation. The indoor cats sprawl in comically improbable postures on the couch. When we go into the garden, Tg, who became an outdoor cat while I was in Perú, sits so regally on his chair that I must pause to pet him. El rey de los gatos. Downstairs, the roses are already so plentiful that I cut a blossom, just past its prime, and go back upstairs to give it to Tg, less for his amusement than for hers when she follows me down into the garden in a moment.
We are often in the garden for awhile in the early evening. We bring down some juice to the table, but instead of sitting we mostly weed this or trim that or rake the other, or pick lemons or loquats. This is our oasis in the concrete urban desert. It is very green. I used to sit here alone, writing a poem or photographing a flower or just chatting with the hummingbirds, rather wishing I might someday have someone to share it with. Now we share it, and everything, with the kind of honest and relaxed delight I’d always imagined lovers could share.
We glance into the crawlspace where the scrawny young black cat, already a mother, has hidden her kittens. Two are calico, three are all black. Initially she hid them in the little utility room under the house; but sometimes when she wasn’t there we went in and held them for awhile, hoping that if they learned to tolerate human companionship we could some day find them a better life than hers. They liked that just fine. She did not, and the other evening they were gone. Fortunately Tg and his mother, Sygga, to whom she is cousin or niece, did her the great favor of standing guard while she was in the new hiding place nursing the kittens. Their intense attention to a small and otherwise uninteresting hole in the fence suggested, even to our sluggish human brains, that the kittens might be in there.
We feed her, as I fed Sygga’s mother, who was also wild. Like Sygga’s mother, she scarfs down the food but loathes us. One might laugh at the failure of her pea-sized brain ever to deduce, from the fact that we bring her cat food and water, that perhaps we do not mean her any harm; or one might respect her instinct, particularly if one contemplated the fact that in time, given an opportunity, not only will we indeed take her kittens away from her (to give them a cushier lot in life, and likely a longer life), but we will also be "socially responsible" enough to deprive her of the ability to make more kittens.
That is the right thing to do. I cannot tell if Sygga has ever forgiven me for doing it. She seems quite content; but when I consider that her main purpose on this planet is to make more cats with her genes in them, and that I’ve taken that away from her, I tend to suspect that if she’d had a vote she’d have voted "Nay."
The garden is just about the way a garden should be in late April. Tulips and iris and columbine in bloom, foxglove and cerinthe thinking about it, lobelia and linaria reappearing to greet me like old friends, and lilies and dahlias almost leaping skyward. Tomato plants rapidly pushing from infancy to youth, reminding of all the people to whom I used to take fresh tomatoes in their offices at the law firm. As do many things, fresh tomatoes inspire quite varied responses, from a polite facial expression that might fairly be translated as "What the fuck is that for?" to delight verging on rapture.
We work, sometimes together, sometimes apart. If we work apart we stop when we pass each other and have a quick hug or kiss. We sit for awhile. We interrupt our sitting to get the ladder. She has befriended a strange young person in the front yard. The strange young person, as does the Asian grandmother next door, fancies the strange, misshapen lemons, the ones that look as if the tree had grown in Dracula’s garden, with long, tapered yellow fangs in place of the traditional soft shape of a lemon. The strange young person likes to photograph them, I think – as I have done on occasion myself. The grandmother, I presume, likes to eat them. (Why she prefers the ones that would cause many of us to turn away in fear or disgust is a mystery that awaits a future life in which we share enough of some language to discuss the matter.)
Back in the garden, we sit a bit, and talk. Today we wrote poems and e-mailed them to each other intermittently, playing off each others’ images. Death took her mother recently. The other Sunday we went sailing with a friend whose cancer had taken his ability to sail the boat by himself but had in no way diminished his love of sailing.
The new kittens are huddled together in a safe place. Tg and his mother are pouncing on things we can’t see, probably insects, perhaps ghosts. The strange youth has another strange lemon to photograph. The hummingbirds are grateful for the refilled feeder.
Perhaps this is life.