I’ll have you know, the cat is glaring at me as I write this.  I am sitting in an artificial valley I have created between mountains of cardboard boxes.  His expression is a mixture of contempt and bewilderment—We have done this moving thing before in his life and he didn’t like it the first time.  It was twelve years ago and he was barely a kitten then.  It took him three days to venture bravely out of the bathtub, which had become his temporary oasis, a refuge in a desert of difference.

Kitty and I have been roommates now for several years.  He originally belonged to my sister who having married found other quarters and coincidentally other cats.  He became my baby, our lives framed by that leaving, a bond of empathy that strengthened our attachment.  But he is staring at me now with that by-the-way-I-hate-you look.

My reasons for moving are practical, economic.  People who don’t finish their Ph.D.s still have to pay for them, so I will move to something smaller and farther away—the kind of place euphemistically called “cozy”.   I have made my life in libraries luckily as an alternate career, still attached to academe, but freer to figure out who I am without that often-censuring peer-group.  It will be a fine and freeing thing.

Kitty doesn’t understand why there are less books now, but more writing, less concentration, but more free thought.  He doesn’t understand that this unchaining is a flowering out of great trial.  He may perceive that I am quieter now, somehow more thoughtful.  When I pet his head I feel his fur.  I look into his eyes now that my mind isn’t a million worrisome places in the past and the future.  He just purrs his appreciation.

So in a little over a month, I am moving into a new place, a new phase in my life.  I am sure to relearn and rediscover much I have packed up and put away over the years.  I hope kitty will be with me the whole time.