Sherry Chandler » Cats in gray and blue
Cats in gray and blue
I was sick that winter. It was inconvenient because my big room was due to be whitewashed. I was put in the little room at the end of the house. The house, nearly but not quite on the crown of the hill, always seemed as if it might slide off into the maize fields below. This tiny room, no more than a slice off the end of the house, had a door, always open, and windows, always open, in spite of the windy cold of a July whose skies were an interminable light clear blue. The cat, a bluish-grey Persian, arrived purring on my bed, and settled down to share my sickness, my food, my pillow, my sleep. When I woke in the morning, my face turned to half-frozen linen; the outside of the fur blanket on the bed was cold, the smell of fresh whitewash from next door was cold and antiseptic; the wind lifting and laying the dust outside the door was cold—but in the crook of my arm, a light purring warmth, the cat, my friend.
—Doris Lessing, from Particularly Cats (Knopf, 1991)
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