Nine years ago I picked up two tiny, summer-bearing, full-sun berry plants for an 11-foot-long garden box that I’d situated along the sunny side of my garage. Today that box overflows with canes —
Meghalaya in monsoon — the perfect time to explore and embrace the beauty of the Sacred Woods. Luna smiled to herself as she recalled this much-loved refrain from her days of childhood and youth. She walked past the moss-slickened stones, boulders flecked with the chartreuse lichen, stopping to admire the white coral mushrooms that were so famous here.
Our bedroom walls were shiny with posters of boy-band chests and bad-boy grins hiding unicorns and floral wallpaper. Our mothers fought us, our little sisters wanted to be us, our fathers avoided us.
Twenty-five years of no meeting up or communication. It wasn’t intentional; she couldn’t remember how it happened. It was an argument, she thinks. But it didn’t matter to her anymore.
I’ve had and loved cats of many colors and patterns, but my heart will always be most captive to the black ones: To their elegance, to their uniqueness within the seeming uniformity, and to the memories they evoke of those now gone. In history and in the now, black cats reign supreme.