As I was leaving this morning, still dark, warmer so no freezing rain today but so windy I found one of the garbage cans (square, four and a half feet tall, heavy) out in the middle of the street, Alpha gave me a bag of stuff I was forgetting and told me the feathers on the doorstep were from a Sperber. Her mother the ornithologist had identified them. This is what a Sperber looks like. According to the text, it is a small bird of prey. The tail feathers (attached to something gristly) found on our doorstep would appear to have come from a male of the species.

No wonder our cat was so proud that day, sitting around in the way purring, expecting to be praised and petted.

He is, you know, a very regal cat. Also the largest cat I have ever seen, and one tough one as well. A neighbor lady once found him in her flower bed. He’d been run over (I suppose I wrote about it at the time) and X-rays showed his pelvis had been crushed. He spent a couple months in a box under my desk recuperating, stinking with gangrene, and so on. But now he seems to be back in business. My theory is he uses hamsters as bait to catch hawks.

He can tell time and always goes out in front of the house when school is out so the kids, who all know him by name, can pet him when they go by. I have also previously written about the way he wakes us up in the mornings, by standing on his hind legs and knocking stuff off our night stands until we let him out. He also follows us on walks, but only as far as the creek, which he will not cross (there is a bridge); instead he waits there for our return. This could mean he is actually some other creature in the body of a large cat; I would guess Jack Palance, because Charles Bronson, although also tough, had that puffiness going towards the end, you know?

Also, when I drove past the field yesterday, after sunrise, there were eight deer grazing next to the woods. Today, it seemed empty but then at the last minute deer emerged from the darkness, a hundred meters further away.

This morning I was wondering whether I wasn’t an atheist after all. The sunrise was quite remarkable, with a good cloud vs sky ratio and color vs gray, as if Helen Frankenthaler, Joseph Mallord William Turner and Theodore Roethke had been having wild sex when a lunchbox full of semtex went off, and the road was nearly empty since most commuters here are still on holiday. But I finally decided that, although I am capable of lying awake nights having existential crises, I lack the strength of conviction and belief to be a decent atheist. I guess I’ll just muddle through for a while, from sunrise to springtime, wife’s laughter to daughter’s hair, sustained by stories of kindness and swinging Gamma so high after dinner she kicks the ceiling and yet, miraculously doesn’t vomit.

Also, I had to think about something Xkot linked a while back, about Mother Teresa’s crises of faith.

Isn’t life something.