I meditated for ten minutes, under the loquat tree, focusing on a corner with lilies just starting to open, with a sprig of bougainvillea curling around them. The succulents recently planted nearby are doing well. Though I could hear the buzz of a weed-eater off in the distance and the whoosh of cars, the hooting mourning dove sounded closer, and stronger.
We had a visitor: a white and yellow cat, collared with a bell that gave no sound, wandered around from the side of the house. It walked right up to our sliding glass door, and stopped. It looked in at our cat, Bistro, who looked out. I took a picture. Lady Bug, his sister, was there, too, though she is not visible in the photo. The cat then saw me, and spent a good few seconds observing me. Suddenly it turned and scampered back the way it had come. Afterwards, the other cats, indoors, jumped to the windows above the sink, anxious to follow it. I don’t know why it ran away. Perhaps the sent of the other cats, wafting from the open windows, changed its mind?
Moments later, my son came outside. “Mom, Bistro is really scared of something. His tail is all puffed out!”
“We just had a visitor,” I said. I told him about the other cat and showed him the picture.
“That cat looks like a bigger version of Marvin,” he said. Marvin was another visitor we’d had years ago, when S was quite young, like Marvin, whose big ears made him look more like a kitten. S was still in elementary school when Marvin came calling.
To follow up on the opening of the Queen of the Night from yesterday’s entry: we checked on it several times: 9pm, 10pm, midnight, even 4am, and it didn’t open. After I texted Jessica in the morning, she responded with her thoughts: given how it was already drooping a bit, most likely it already opened Tuesday night, so we missed it. So better luck next time! However, I did find come cool time-lapse posts that others have made of this remarkable plant. Here’s a video credited to Brett Flippen as producer:
After a day or two, I should probably move this footnote to yesterday’s entry.
