Azalea
6:30, First sun in a week or so. A black cat walks across the garden. Funny to see an animal other than our pet dog Coo-chan there. While she was alive, she would never let a stranger, man or cat, enter the garden. Once, she bit a gardener when he inadvertently got in her territory. She was a coward.
She is no longer here... nowhere. 
Her picture is put on the fridge door. She's looking at me as if she had something to say. She was afraid of a camera. So the picture is one of the rare ones. My daughter says "Tadaima" to her in this picture every time she comes home. We know she's gone. But in a way she is still here with us. In the garden, in the pictures. Her leash still has her body smell. A wisp of her cottony hair hangs on a branch trembling in wind, a bequest left at a corner of the garden...She lives in our memory. That's a cliche but how true. No sadness. No sadness. There is a deepest kind of happiness that is left to us.
The spot under the bushy azalea is dark in the morning sunlight. She sleeps there. Time stopped at age 17.
