Occasionally, alone here at the keyboard in the dark, I hear her stand and shake in the kitchen or catch her slinking past the door in the kitchen going to the litter box, which is no longer in the mud room under the sink either.
I can hear her purring behind me on the quilt no longer spread on the floor for the last couple of weeks she struggled to stay with us.
I took this picture a couple of months before she died. I have a sequence of a dozen or show that I took that day as she dug around in the bark dust under the lilac. Just digging and sniffing and digging some more. I don't know what she was looking for up there. There were no gopher mounds, no moles runs, and she never stopped to piss or shit.
She's buried a little to the left and further up the slope from the stone in the top right of the picture.