Cat prayers

Ursula taps the arm of the chair she’s been sitting in, she then stands on the arm and lowers one paw until she feels something solid, the table between the chairs in what we call the reading room. On the table are magazines and books. It is a small round table. She steps onto its surface, checks the edge slowly, isn’t sure what side she’s on. She stops and listens. Whatever echolocation she’s using tells her not to jump off the side close to the mantel. She crosses to me and then taps the arm of the chair I’m in, steps up and into my lap. She has gained weight since her cancer diagnosis in September. We now refer to her as “pulling a Kiki” in remembrance of the gray cat who lived more than nine lives. She seems better most days, she is active and animated. She stays on my lap purring, I’m reading so I balance my book and rub her head, massage her shoulders. She stretches out over my legs and purrs louder. She has become a lap cat if only for a moment. She’ll never match Comet, the Queen of Lap-dom, but I’ll take this small gesture. Zora comes into the room and takes the chair her sister just abandoned. She assumes the Sphinx position and faces me. She half blinks, blinks again and then dozes. Zora is morally opposed to sitting on a lap, she doesn’t like being picked up, she hates a cuddle. Her time is always her time, did I ask you to touch me? she seems to say. But when she does want attention, she is demanding, under foot following you, doing her ack little meow. She likes to be brushed, but once again, on her time and when she’s done, she’s hurt your feelings done.



Ursula shifts and turns, she walks up, across me to get to the back of the chair where she stretches out and washes her face. I’ve turn just slightly to watch her. She wets the paw and then crosses her face; it reminds me then of something. I have visited a lot of churches over the years. I liked to sit in the wide arc of the cathedrals, those cave-like expenditures of human want, and watch people. If people were inside, praying or sitting quietly I’d come along a wall and sit far back. Many times people crossed themselves as they came to the nave, a curtsy motion, a genuflection, but the crossing was much the same as what Ursula does now, rote and unthinking. Something slowly repeated. Innate. This gentle washing. This cat blessing.

I love both the cats, maybe more than I should, and I sing their little songs to them throughout the day. It is hard to fathom they have been with us a year now. The pandemic year did change trajectories of space (not the Representative Gomert trajectories) and time. One year became many or was lost like dust. But in the plane of cat time, there is always an errant whisker, a dash of fur, a small round body print on a blanket; a cat who may or may not want you to pick them up. The successful cat lady learns to read the signs and alter her day, and her song, as needed.

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