WEDNESDAY, NO CAL, COUPLE YEARS AGO (STILL TRUE!):

     Sitting outside in Oakland’s mid-August.  The breeze utterly cool, the sunshine very bright, the sky a deep, deep blue.  Watching butterflies (flutterbyes) do their mad ditzy dance above the fennel and the nasturtiums (or ‘mastershums,’ as sez Winnie-ther-Pooh, who Knows About Such Things) – watching especially one black-and-yellow striped swallowtail, so extravagantly winged with those two bindi dots of vermillion and indigo on the very bottom of its tail, invisible unless it stops to slowly open and close its flying-fairy-dusted wings (because what could be more fairy-tale-like than a caterpillar – essentially a furry worm – spinning silk out of its ass to make its own chrysalis, and after a period of complete stillness, emerge as that most unlikely creature, a winged and beautiful butterfly??)

     The day like a caress, everything green and swaying, bees and hummingbirds sucking nectar, the squirrels busily eating the giant face of a drooping sunflower, plums turning to prunes on the opaque scrim of roof that covers the patio while I harvest one obscenely ginormous zuke (or courgette, as did you know they’re called not just in France but in England, too?) and two perfectly circular eggplants, along with a mass of candy-sweet yellow cherry tomatoes, a big bunch of lettuce and wild arugula for the evening’s salad (my boyfriend is bringing, as he put it, the carne e vino – my red meat fix for the month, and notice yes I make him buy it, in keeping with my guilty hope that as long as I don’t countenance the trade economically, it won’t go on my karmic record – I know, I know. BAH, ETC).

     Hanging outside on a compact little beanbag, surrounded by my favorite small and eccentric friends:  Roscoe (‘you’re a dog!’) Rosconi, and four cats:  Nemo the gent, nearly sixteen years old and quite thin (he has a thyroid disorder I would kill for, and one we now successfully medicate) with his triangular little alien face, his huge green-gray eyes, lying on the bench by the stairs, making everyone who passes pay a petting tax.  And there’s XoXo-Motley, his sister who is all black, all the time, lying melted on the couch, her fur like a stole draped on the cushions, her body gone boneless, while our Maine Coon, Thelonius Monkey Kitty does his namesake right – he’s the real ‘other’ – cat enough to catch a lizard, or a mouse, but much too bodhi to follow through on the kill.  He has his own particular lope (we tease him that he walks as though down a runway, putting each paw in front of the next, making the bell on his collar jingle most specifically).  When I see him while I’m walking down the street, he is most congenial and always stops to turn his face up, hi!  Nice to see ya! 

     And then there’s my very own Abyssinnian, one Zelda (party animal) aka Zelly, lying within hand’s reach, curled up in half-sun, half-shade, her pretty little face sweet in semi-doze, ears twitching when I talk to her, while Roscoe madly guards me, her, his stick, the yard, and the walkway beyond, and is ever-available (if unwanted) to police any kitty skirmish; he lies in the sun jawing on today’s stick, staying very close, squinting at my every move. 

Above me I can hear the birds twittering back and forth, hear the squirrels scamper and chirp. 

It’s a beautiful day and nobody’s suffering in my immediate radius.  
Surely that’s reason enough to rejoice.