The Orange Tree Revisited

It feels so good to sit in the sun. I don't know when I did this last. Jack, the best cat in the whole world, is licking his genitals a few feet away. He came up to me earlier with his giant blue eyes, and I pet him like a cute thing. I included him in my nonfiction, but I'm adding more to it. Right now I have a kind of skeleton. It's an essay about car accidents. It's also kind of about two relationships and about depression and anxiety. It's at that point where it could be good. It's not yet, but it could be. I'm trying to capture what it is that's so terrifying about cars. In my mind, it's obvious. You put yourself in an enviornment where thousands of pounds of metal are hurdling at you from all directions, and you do it every day as part of routine, expecting it to be safe. Maybe I know too many people who have died, or maybe I've just been hit and almost hit too many times to take it for granted. I have to find a way to get all of this across in an essay.

I'm sitting by the orange tree in my backyard. I wrote a poem about it a while ago. In the poem I said that there are ten cats burried beneath it. It's not true. A bunch of them were left at the vet. I don't know what they do with dead cats there. Some of them were taken by the humane society. Leo just disappeared. I like to think that he was just taken by someone who thought he was cute, and that he's being taken care of right now- being fed, playing with kids. My dad and I burried Lilly, my grandmas dachsund, in her backyard. For a long time there was this scandal, and everyone was worried that we'd buried her vertically, as if we didn't have enough sense to lay her flat. She was older than I was, and I'd known her all my life.

This was meant to be a happy blog. And I'm pretty happy right now. I'm sitting in the sun, drinking diet coke, looking around for my cat. Come here, Jack! Ugh, he's disappeared. Sawyer is a big ball of white fluff on my mom's bed. Sparrows are flying down to steal seeds from the parakeets. I've seen Jack jump for those sparrows, but I've never seen him catch one.

Somewhere in the divorce process, my mom's second divorce, our cat ate one of our birds. My mom was really sad, but she pet the cat that was sprawled across her lap. She said she finally understood how God could love all people even when they hurt each other, because she loved the cat and bird, but didn't love the cat any less when it ate the bird.