Nocturnal Visitors

I dreamed I had three pets.  Two cats and a dog.  They were all accidental / rescues - animals who had either come to me or been given to me (in the case of the dog temporarily), and then just stayed.  I had the same condo, but I was able to lean out the window and talk to the people in the next house.  A man asked me if my water bill had been high.  His wife came into my house out of curiosity.

I'm reading Parable of the Sower and it's a revelation.  Written in 1993, it's so prescient.  I realized from looking at the flyleaf that Octavia Butler was someone I should have discovered long ago, and would have loved.  I mourned the fact that she died young in 2006.  But now there are all the other books she wrote that I can explore.  She had such a sharp mind and wonderful imagination.

Back to the dream, though, dreaming of pets leaves me with a comforting spiritual residue.  The purity of animal's souls is so reassuring.

I don't know if anybody even reads my blog anymore.  I haven't tended it in a long time.  It's like a neglected garden that has turned to weeds and stick-like skeletons of previous plants.

But there's something different about blogging than journaling.  It bypasses the mundane.  It gives the other parts of my brain a voice.

It snowed this morning.  Wind-blown flakes that left little handkerchief patterns on the gray wooden slats of the porch.  But now it seems to be finished, and the grass is still that combination of tough, green grass and the dead brown leaves that have fallen off my neighbor's tall trees.

I love those trees almost as much as the plants on my kitchen shelves.  I think it might be time for the geraniums to bloom again.  The red one first.  Then the white.

There's no point to this, obviously.  I just wanted to mark the place where the two cats and dog appeared.  One of the cats was a brown and gray tiger.  She was curled purring at my feet.  The other cat was black and white with a patch of white over one eye.  He was young and active, always chasing some invisible creature around the rooms.  And the dog was a small brown and white mutt with soft fur and a sweet, imploring face.  He was sitting with his head on his front paws, looking up at me under those expressive doggy eyebrows.

They didn't have names in the dream.  And aren't all names just incidental?

The dog in the photo is Iggy, my son's dog.