Herbie
Cat Tails #3
We lived at our grandmother’s house for one summer. The four rooms were small and heavy with the adults’ not knowing. “I’m going to play with the cat!” I’d shout running out of the door and away from the frightening reality that since my dad had left, nobody was in charge of reality anymore.
The cat was a weathered, mossy garden ornament banished to the end of the long garden. I called it Herbie because it was lost in an ancient herb garden gone to seed as my Grandmother’s arthritis curled her hands away from the earth and into her body. Together Herbie and I built whole worlds amidst the songbirds and the weeds.
Then one day, there you were! A real live Herbie sitting primly behind your stone namesake! My best and favorite secret. I snuck you slices of wafer thin ham and chicken roll. Wet, salty sandwich meat for children that appalled my Grandmother.
I never touched you, afraid that perhaps you weren’t quite real and I would break the illusion but I told you everything and you listened. I told you that I loved my dad and that I hated him. I told you that I was frightened of my mum’s silence. I told you stories and worries and gossip I’d overheard from the grownups as if they were all being read from the same book.
I’m too old now to remember what exactly I said. The details were all lost with my baby teeth. But I remember you listening, smiling, purring. Glassy eyes speckled and shining.
We went on to live a new life. Chaotic and sharp edged for a time, before settling in to itself. And even now, I think of you at the end of a garden that was slowly outgrowing us all. Collecting my worries and troubles so I didn’t have to hold them. Did you bury them safely under stone Herbie so that the earth could digest them? Did you whisper them into the ears of blackbirds so they could sing them away into the purple June evenings?
I’m too old now but I want you to know, I still have so much that I wish I could tell you.