ms bear remembered
Her early years were shrouded in mystery, at least to us humans in the house. She showed up in our lives some fifteen years ago, an already grown felis domesticus, with a tangled mass of beautiful brown fur, bad eyesight and a meow purrfectly calibrated to spur the most somnolent human in the household to her desired action, opening a closed door, filling an empty food bowl. She was the last of the four felines who back moved back with us to the bay side of the Berkeley hills. She tenaciously resisted her decline until the very end, which came yesterday. Farewell ms. woolly bear. Your absence is a palpable thing.
[originally written 28 March 2004]