kitty :(

The kitten in the picture in the entry below is one of several we saw in Ikebukuro, but my parents just had put my 11-year-old cat Siesta to sleep and buried her in the backyard.

She was the guardian of our perimeters and while she would frequently incur battle scars from her toussles she never failed to give intruding animals a terrific beat-down. She left increasingly and inexplicably large prey on our front porch, placed neatly next to the newspaper every morning, clearly as some sort of offering and tribute to us, her high priests. She would come when you called her name and used to follow me around like a loyal dog when I was 13 and had a paper route.

Pets are kinda jerks because they kind of worm their way into your lives and then when they're gone you sort of feel disconnected from the natural world temporarily.