About this time last year a former colleague announced that he was retiring at the end of the school year. In my congratulatory e-mail I invited him to go outside and breathe deeply of the fragrant May morning we were experiencing. Imagine what a weekday morning will smell like next year, I told him.

I spent all of today at home, a good deal of it breathing in the essence of May. Everything in the backyard vista is a golden green, not the brief first green-gold that Robert Frost lamented (“Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold”), but that next shade, the one that bears the promise of June’s deep velvet green.

Something was bothering the crows early this morning. They were darting back and forth across the meadow in great noisy swoops, screeching and flapping and dipping low to the ground. Later I heard squirrels chattering and giving the same kind of screech. I looked up and saw a neighborhood cat in the first fork of the Leaning Tree, a specimen that grows out for several feet more like an inclined plane than a straight pole.

This cat has a sleek black and white coat that is obviously groomed -- someone’s
well-cared-for pet. I’ve seen it off and on for about a year now, usually walking along the row of forsythia that separates our property from the broad meadow that belongs to the church. Ron has seen it nosing around the rocks that landscape the perimeter of our pond. Chipmunks have taken up residence in the spaces where the rocks are piled up to cover the pump apparatus and the tubing which makes a little waterfall and pool outside the deeper pond proper.

We haven’t had a cat in the house since Leon keeled over on Columbus Day in 1989. Leon was the stray I took in early in 1975, about the time I met my first husband. (The cat stayed twice as long.) I named him Leon after my favorite college professor, although I cannot now remember why I thought this was an appropriate tribute to the man who gave me William Carlos Williams. We acquired a second cat in 1978, brought home one day from the shelter by the first husband, probably after I sighed once too often during a baby product commercial. 

I loved my cats. I took pictures of them and put them in frames (some of them are still displayed). I was a “cat person,” although I am easily irritated by talk of being “owned” by cats or hearing people refer to their cats as their children. I once extended hospitality to my sister’s cat, and was very put off when a cat-owning friend picked the animal up and cooed, “Is Aunt Margaret taking good care of you?” Even when I was childless by choice, I knew that cats were cats.

Nevertheless, the cats were pretty well established in the household when my second husband arrived on the scene. He is NOT a cat person. In his first marriage he’d kept horses on his property for his older daughters. There he tolerated the presence of cats only as utilitarian beasts with a job to do in the barn. I see now that he must have loved me very much, for he learned to tolerate Leon and Punkin as household members, as they learned to tolerate him.

When Lynn was born I had some misgivings at first, but it seems that as soon as the cats determined that she was not a rival for their food supply, they ignored her. When she entered toddlerhood and became curious about them, they learned to evade her.

Punkin was the first to go. In 1988 he suddenly lost a lot of weight and couldn’t drink any water. Heroic measures were available (surgery, chemotherapy), but I had neither the means nor the desire for that. I sat in a private room at the vets, held him for a while, and then came home without him. Leon was more than thirteen years old by then, and my relationship with him began to change. 

Looking back, I think maybe he was experiencing the kind of depression and other maladies of aging that can beset people, especially people who have lost a long time companion. Within a year of the disappearance of Punkin, Leon mostly ate in the morning, slept on the back porch all day if it was warm, ate some more, and then slept in the kitchen all night. When I came home from school on Columbus Day (I remember because Ron was off work) I saw Leon stretched out on the sidewalk. Something didn’t look right. As I approached him, I saw his eyes open and glinting a bright glassy green, and I knew.

We buried him out just beyond the property line. I explained to Lynn, then four, what had happened, in very “tenth good thing about Barney” terms, and showed her where we would bury him. I don’t remember now how I explained Punkin’s sudden absence, and I don’t know what, if any, connection she made about the two events.

It had recently become her job to keep Leon's bowl filled with Meow Mix. I was experiencing a degree of grief, and I didn’t bother putting away the bowl or disposing of the dry cat food, which we kept in a canister that said “I Love My Cat” (a gift from the cats-as-children friend). About a week after Leon’s death Lynn told me that we needed more crunchies.

“No we don’t, honey,” I said. “Leon doesn’t need food anymore.”

“Well, he’s been eating it,” she said.

It turned out that every day after school she had dutifully taken a scoop of dry cat food out to the burial spot and spread it on the rock we’d placed to keep carrion birds away. Every day, when she noticed the little pellets all gone, she concluded that Leon was indeed eating them and was in need of more.

I threw the bowl away that evening. I still have the canister, though. It’s in the basement, with the last box of cat pan liners I bought.

Sometimes I long to have a cat around again. Then I remember how much work they are, and I wonder what we would do about our fish, and our backyard birds, and the endearing parakeet that lives beside the kitchen window and sings to me as I write.

I content myself with framed pictures.