I sip my coffee and gaze out of the large picture window of the sunroom into the garden. A rabbit darts across the edge of the lawn, over the rock where we buried Cocoa. I like to think he is among his own kind, even now. I open the door to let the morning in, and Sugar out. She pads carefully down the stone steps, dowager-like. The air is cool and fresh, washed clean of summer humidity. I inhale deeply, savoring it.
Sugar walks along the old stone wall that borders the azalea hedge like a terrace, separating the upper garden from the lower. The pond, teeming with lilies and vines, juts into a wide basin of lawn below. Towering trees of oak, maple, and pine anchor this setting, their high canopies almost touching, like mothers’ heads at a playground.
A bird bath rests in the middle of the stone wall, filled to the brim with last night’s rain. Sugar stops to drink from its shallow bowl. It had belonged to my father, who liked to watch the birds under California's desert sun, some years ago now. The birds that live in this Connecticut garden have made themselves invisible while Sugar drinks, but I can hear them protesting her presence noisily from the trees.
Sugar is too old to hunt now. She still likes to sit outside and watch the birds though, reliving her prime in the slight twitch of her tail or flick of her eyes. On days that I weed, she prowls slowly among the shrubs, or naps near me on sun-heated flagstones, warming her old bones. She will often join me in the evenings when I water the flowerbeds, sitting just outside reach of the hose, and watch the spray in companionable silence.
As my cat makes her way back along the wall toward the house I look beyond her to the grass shimmering emerald green from all the rain we’ve had this summer. The birds still wait impatiently for Sugar to disappear before resuming their regular flight patterns, but white butterflies dance across my view like its a stage set in open air.
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