Rainy Day Bath Mats

Even telling all that stuff yesterday I still didn’t tell everything about the day I'd had Tuesday. Didn’t say that I played the part of Lucius in a reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Call'd you, my lord?”) or that I took our elderly uncle out to sit by the pond, or that I came out of somebody's house at 10:30 at night to find my car utterly gone and towed.... But more on all that later.When I woke at 5 yesterday morning it was to the sound of rain.Nothing makes me happier than rain drumming on the little roof outside our bedroom window, wetting the rocks on the stone wall by the driveway.I was happy too because it meant the painters wouldn’t be coming. (The last time we had this old place painted I was breastfeeding and spent whole weeks ducking from room to room looking for a place where the newborn and I would perhaps NOT  be surprised by the sudden appearance at the window of  a pleasant male stranger on a ladder.) They’re lovely, these new painters, but they do arrive early and there they are too, at the windows at quarter past seven.Not yesterday though and what a break. At 8am I opened the back door contemplating a quick walk around the block but by then it was raining even harder.I thought of Abe and Charlotte, our two nice cats, off in Heaven now hunting for field mice. They looked upon a rainy day as a chance to perfect their impersonation of two bath mats, one black and one gray.Here they are the day our kids gave them to us, as a surprise on our 25th anniversary.It’s a gift cats have, the way they can stretch out anywhere and lick their paws. I once knew a couple of cats who napped in the sink.I’d like to to start being more like them and when I wake up at 5 to learn to  close my eyes, smile that feline smile and drop back into sleep.