Vox Meditantis

What is good about having a pet?

Monday, 10th November 2025

The best thing about a creature who expects breakfast at the same time each day is that it turns time from an order into an invitation, a bell that rings you back to the world without scolding.

I don’t keep a creature of my own, unless you count the fern that leans towards the window with ecclesiastical devotion, but Tom’s small dog made a case for loyalty this morning by sitting precisely where the sun warmed the harbour bench, neither in need of philosophy nor opposed to it.

There is a sanity in such arrangements: a body requires care, and the giving of it returns the lender to herself – less as a moral than as the ordinary physics of attention settling where it can be of use.

By nine I was at the long table with Maggie, whose patience with paper is a civic service, the Historical Society a good room for questions that don’t want spectacle, just light and a clean surface.

We laid the small parcel between us as if it were a teacup carried too quickly, the postmark smudged, the address not quite ours, and my mother’s hand unmistakable in the way it overreached the margin, audacious and tidy at once.

I read one line only – enough for one day – because metabolising is an art and because some doors should be opened by the handle, not the hinge: “Kept aside for spring, if spring will have me.”

Maggie, who knows the streets the way a good nurse knows a night ward, ran a finger along an old map and said the misaddressed lane could have been a pre-numbering habit or a clerk’s optimism about where letters want to go.

We let it be, for now, and made one practical move: she’ll check the accession notes in the morning, and I took a rubbing of the stamp to carry up the hill like a pilgrim’s token with errands instead of incense.

Marcus slid a cup across the counter without commentary, which is its own hospitality, and asked after nothing more demanding than whether I’d like the lid.

Dan, who can locate a pamphlet faster than most people can locate their keys, produced a slender guide on regional postmarks and told me – gently, as if the paper itself might bruise – that ink formulae can date a year more reliably than memory when memory is trying to be brave.

Jenny sent a list at lunch that looked like concern disguised as stationery – opening hours, a note about a poet I should like, and a reminder about the museum’s Tuesday watercolours, which I have promised to treat as an experiment rather than a vow.

So I did the smallest bold thing and signed my name on the sheet by the door, the way one begins to carry a tune by humming under the breath where no one is asked to be impressed.

On the upper streets, flags had begun to appear along the green with that peculiar quiet that precedes a procession, brass polished, hymn boards adjusted, and Father Walsh practicing the gentle logistics of a crowd that has come to stand still.

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and New Corinth will keep it as it does most solemn things – without boasting and with exactness – eleven sounding like a held breath you can hear with your hands.

David waved from across the square with a violin case and the smile of a man who knows the difference between rehearsal and performance and respects both equally, which seems the right stance for grief and gratitude.

I carried the rubbed stamp in my pocket like a coin I wasn’t ready to spend and thought about pets again – how the best of them enforce proportion by asking, plainly, for what they need, thereby rescuing their people from abstraction.

A neighbour’s cat, unlicensed and unimpressed by my schedule, escorted me for twenty yards and then dismissed me at the corner where the light does its hour-long gold trick, sermon over, congregation released.

If there is a good in having such company, perhaps it lives here: an animal keeps your promises to the day from becoming theoretical, which is to say, it keeps your feet from floating.

The letter feels like that kind of creature – quietly insisting on a routine of looking and then pausing, of reading and then walking, of allowing the town to push back with its own evidence.

There are threads I am not tugging too hard: Thursday’s quiet hours remain inviolate, the Québec notion sits on the sill like a postcard that will tell me when it wants to be addressed, and the guest room has the airy patience of a place that remembers more than it requires.

In clinic, the names change but the ethics do not, and today’s work held, as most days do, a reminder that listening is an economy where attention, once paid, strengthens the currency rather than depleting it.

If the misaddress was error, it was a human one, which somehow makes the envelope feel more true – like a path that takes two extra turns and still arrives at the same door, chastened and intact.

I am trying to treat the fragments as instructions rather than temptations, which is how one keeps faith with both the living and the dead without turning either into a project.

This evening the harbour put its shoulder to the dark in that competent way it has, Tom’s dog recused himself from further symbolism and chose sleep, and I made tea with the solemnity of a minor rite.

The rubbing of the stamp sits under a paperweight beside a clean envelope, not as a tableau but as a promise that tomorrow I will make one more outward step and one more inward one, in that order.

There will be a hush at eleven, and then the day will move again, and somewhere between the two I’ll open another line, no faster than trust can bear.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.