Nocturnes
Cast of Characters
Your younger dog: Dolly, 11-year-old dear but prickly (rude) Border Collie who suffers no fools, and is also conversant in Latin. (I don’t know Latin.) Dolly died on September 16. We all miss her dearly.
Your youngest dog: Nellie, 5-year-old impulsive rascally yellow Lab
Your youngest cat: Puma, 4-year-old oversized Coon cross
Your youngest girl cat: Luna, Puma’s tiny sister, bit of a know-it-all, resorts to Latin sometimes
Your younger cat: Noci, daughter Grace’s cat, now living in Bellingham WA (Noci texts incomprehensibly, avoiding all vowels [except y])
Your oldest dog: Lacey, our very dear ancient black Lab, who died three years ago
Your oldest cat: cross-eyed and endearing though also often cross Siamese Demo, who also died, shortly after Lacey
Your canaries: shy sweet birds (in reality they’ve met their demises but still get a voice)
Backstory
I started these in early September 2020, when my good friend Herbert fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. Herbert was then in his mid-80s. During this first peak of Covid, he was confined in traction to a hospital bed. He and his wife Norma, also a very close friend, both writers, couldn’t collaborate, as they had each night for many years, to invent a story to lull each other to sleep.
Still deep in grief from my husband’s death almost a year earlier, and isolated from the pandemic, I wrote one for them. My only rule for writing was: no dark. If I started a scene and it began to drift ominous, I stopped, backed up, and rerouted.
After two weeks Herbert was feeling better enough to talk and Norma said I could stop… but I found composing these helped me relax and feel more aware of the world in welcome ways, both through the writing and the sending, because it was a reliable way to connect each evening in an increasingly detached existence due to the pandemic.
So I kept up the practice, and a few more friends and acquaintances asked for them, too.
The first year they were often on the long side and ethereal, shifting as I adjusted to the loss of my husband, coalescing in summer 2021 into a short form following a pattern involving nature, the moon, and the animals listed below, who live (and lived) here with me.
