We never arrive, but
The weather is up and down. There is no one day when you put away one coat, and take out another.
Instead we keep all our coats close to hand. Coats of different weights and lengths, like pencils. And gloves, and hats.
We line the wide windowsills with blankets, so Mina can be cozy when she looks out over the roof tops.
She leaps up at the caw of a crow. Wide-eyed, all systems go.
Yesterday I found a crab claw on the balcony.
“Is that —”
“Yes it is —”
In New York, we are never far from the sea.
*
Mina has been to the vet, now, and she has returned.
We’ve scooped her up, and zipped her into her carrier, and taken her to Atlantic and Bond and back again, and released her — our familiar — in her familiar surroundings.
On the way home, cold rain fell, and the Uber driver, Pooja, from northern India, worried about her recent parking ticket.
“Tell me,” she said, “when do they put those locks on your wheels?”
She said a dollar doesn’t buy as much as it used to, and that it is cheaper to live in other cities, but there is no work.
And all I could say was, “I know, I know,” softly.
*
Mina sleeps on my lap. Her fur — sunny to the touch.
“I love that we’re a good home for Mina.”
“We're a better home for Mina, because we have Mina.”
It’s a circle, and in that circle I find some rest at last.
We never arrive, but we can set some things down.