What price love?
The first time we heard it, we said, “What is that?” It was the sound of something wooden being bumped against the floor, like someone advancing toward us on a wooden leg. Now, it’s familiar–it’s Ruby dragging her lovey toward us.
Her first lovey was a little pink fluff ball that you stuck against something. I wuv u, it said on its little jutting tag. Tasha, the other cat, stole it off my computer one fine day, and Ruby adopted it, and my husband taught her to fetch it. But Pinkie got lost, and we didn’t pay much attention to Ruby’s new interest in a cat fishing pole with a wooden handle. We’d sorta kinda notice that she had dragged it to the food bowl, where she and Tasha store things they love, but we didn’t attach much significance to it.
Now an evening isn’t complete unless at some point during the evening news we hear Ruby dragging the fishing pole, or Baby, as I call it, to us. She always brings it to the threshold, drops it, and then and only then joins the rest of us in our news fix. I find Baby all over the house, in the bedroom hallway, in my office, and of course in the kitchen at the food bowl. Sometimes Ruby has dropped its rag/ribboned head into the water bowl, another sign of her great affection toward something she loves.
Pinkie used to be baptized regularly with Ruby’s enduring tenderness.
Karleen Koen — writing life 