Cat with flowers

Its dish was empty; no one called.

The white cat padded round the drained pools and down the pebbled path through the formal gardens. It sat quite still for a moment and then twined through a border of viburnum. Again, it stopped beneath bushy roses, whose white petals sifted down as the white cat darted toward a flash of gray on the pebble walk. It was tracking a field mouse. The field mouse blended into the gray and brown of the pebble and stone just as the white cat blended into a border of pearl-drops, as if neither were substantial, shadow chasing shadow.

—Martha Grimes from The Five Bells and Bladebone (Little, Brown, 1987)

Harry Rutherford mentioned last week how difficult it is to photograph his black cat Posy. The same is true of “our Bert” as Dickens might style him, though I sort of enjoy the way he absorbs light. In this shot, he is merely sleeping on the footstool beside the flowers all boxed up to carry to my mother’s open house. I had stashed the flowers between footstool and wall to protect them from cat depredation but Bertie found them. And the cat was so black, and the flowers, arranged by Smits Greenhouse, so full of color that I snapped the photo.

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