A black flash registered on my consciousness. I focused in. It was a slender black cat darting daintily across blacktop. We were in the driveway behind a fifties style roadside stand at a Lake Erie beach resort. Lyn and I had just finished old-fashioned hamburgers and milkshakes. Off-season the place did not look its best. But the owner had made an effort at keeping up with Elvis posters, old gasoline pumps and a Chevy convertible with big tail fins. A giant jack-o-lantern grinned at us from the stand's main window and stacks of corn stalks announced Halloween.
Off the lake, there was a bite in the breeze that scattered brown leaves before it. Crystalline sunlight glistened off the cat's sleek coat. And in her mouth was a dainty bundle of fur. Even at speed the thin-bodied feline placed her white tipped black feet daintily and held her head at an unusually high angle protecting the blind kitten she transported.
I smiled and thought of my mother who had died only six months before. I'm an old man and still I think of my mother and how I could do no wrong in her eye. How she shepherded and tended me even to the last as the burden of tending had fallen more to me. I missed her. Yesterday I received in the mail a letter from Mom's church inviting me to a mass on All Souls day in honor of all who died this year. I discarded it.
I followed mother cat across the black parking lot. I watched her disappear into a freshly painted white storage shed behind the stand. The door was open. I peeked in after her. She was carefully working her way up the shelves, over number ten cans of catsup and huge jars of black olives and kosher pickles. I was surprised at her dexterity with that fragile bundle in her mouth.
Then she lost it. The kitten slipped from her mouth, slithered and bounced in the vertical maze of wire shelving. I gasped in the silence. Then mother cat and the babe cried out. I felt a shock of guilt. Was it my fault? Should I intervene?
Mother cat was quicker than my thought. In a twist and bound she was there. Grasped her babe in her mouth, again sped upward. I lunged forward to inspect what was happening more closely as the pair disappeared through a hole in the ceiling that I had not seen before.
I was surprised and relieved. Mother cat had taken the problem out of my hands. I felt she knew better what to do for her little offspring than I and that they were safe in her heavenward nest.
I think that, as well as taking my grandkids trick or treating this Halloween, I'll go to that All Souls Mass for Mom after all.
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