Minos

 

The months of Spring were months of recovery for M, and the last months of Minos's life. Towards the end of April, he suddenly became extremely ill, having developed blood clots in both hind legs and lungs; a condition we had been advised about, and had medicated him against. There was no hope for our suffering cat, even though I had wished that he could slip away there in the garden, we were obliged to take him to the vetinary surgeon, where the dose to bring about the end of his life was administered. 

We buried him in a cardboard coffin beside his brother, Silas, whom he had survived by seven months, in the garden, and planted pansies over his grave. The garden, despite the presence of the multitude of bees, and gatherings of little birds, seems almost unbearably quiet without him. 

I remind myself that both he and Silas lived long, full lives, lives began at the lodge in Hampshire, continued in my mother's garden in Hampshire, and concluded after many years with M and I in Somserset. I remember, also, the game Minos played with an empty snail shell in the days before his death; leaping and diving, and pouncing like a kitten despite his fifteen years. A chapter has closed. I feel intense grief for our beloved cats, but above all, an overwhelming gratitude for their having lived with us in mutual companionship and, it is not too fanciful to say, love.

 

wind chime

A tangle of painted glass and cotton threads lying on a table at the local car boot sale one bitter morning in early February catches my eye, occasions a start of recognition, for this is something that I have not seen since childhood, when it's replica hung at the window of my parent's kitchen forty or so years ago.

Fearing that the frail object may not be complete, that some of the glass may be broken, I carefully take it up in my hand to examine it more closely. Once suspended from my fingers, the threads realign themselves, and the glass pieces swing freely from them, an evocative, delicate mineral chime sounding on the cold air as they touch against each other.

What chance that I should find undamaged, save for the loss of the bottom most central pendant, such a thing, on such a morning as this, when the wind blows without inhibition from the North, and my joyfully resurging memories are of balmy afternoons in Spring, the kitchen window flung open to admit the scented moving air, my younger self transfixed with pleasure at the complex configuration of pellucid sounds as the fragile chimes strike one another in  response to the tremulous breeze?