Prescott is unimpressed with pencils.

Like every ageless child, she has a soft spot for crayons.

But her heart belongs to markers.

A note of clarification is in order. Prescott‘s heart, vast and velvety, belongs to many persons, places, and things.

Prescott’s heart belongs to the morning, the mending hours when yesterday high-fives today, and the sky out the Lobby door erupts in welcome. Long before the long-legs arrive, there are colors only the cats can see over Tabby’s Place.

Prescott’s heart belongs to the volunteers, who follow the sunrise and outshine its oranges, stopping to laud each cat as they bustle to the liturgies of litter. Laundry lists and thunderous tasks do not blind our volunteers to the miracles meandering the Lobby. One by one, they stop to love, and love begins the day.

Prescott’s heart belongs to the staff, besotted biscuits who sop up every cat’s gravy as though they were the first, last, and only cat on earth. Shouting orders like Grecca or whispering praise like Prescott, mellow like Valerie or pungent as an Olive, every cat is the #1 Best Hero Super Splendor Wonder Cat to these people. They are incurably sincere, terminally smitten in all directions.

Prescott’s heart would belong to gravy, if given the chance.

Prescott’s heart belongs to Mortimer, master curmudgeon and fellow skygazer. Mort creaks and complains and urinates in creative locations. Mort is declared marvelous hourly by human beings who live behind lenses of love. Prescott likes being near Mortimer.

Prescott takes it all in. Prescott’s heart belongs to Tabby’s Place.

Like every child, Prescott’s heart simply belongs.

Every cat is entitled to belong, but they wear their entitlement differently. Gator is Entitlement Incarnate. (This is also the name he would like us to airbrush on his vintage Camaro.) Gulliver gushes “aw shucks, little old me?”

But Prescott is purified gratitude. The Lobby’s grey willow gives every indication that she knows how lucky she is, and she knows that “lucky” is too weak and leaky a word for what she is. Her eyes are ever wide. Her joy burbles at a rolling boil.

She needs her bladder expressed daily, and her injuries will echo down the halls of her years. But she will have years — she, the cat not expected to last the night. She will have friends: countless, devoted, long-legged, long-tailed, long-term. She will have mornings, sturdy and golden.

Prescott seems aware that all of this could have been otherwise. An improbable dawn broke over her broken heart and broken body. The sunrise, the kisses, the liquid poultry, survival itself — none of it was inevitable.

Everything is gift.

She knows — you see it in her starry eyes, you feel it in the rise of her spine — that she has been written into a story too wonderful for words.

She has been written into a story too certain for pencil.

She needs a bold, permanent marker. No dry-erase whimper will do.

Prescott is writing the book of love that can’t be smudged. She has found herself the protagonist in the novel nutty enough to make every character a main character. She is reading, in every ear scratch, every reliable meal, every hour away from pain, the true story: love lasts.

Prescott, the cat who’s seen more pain than the rest of us put together, sees further than even old man Mortimer.

She sees the happy ending that doesn’t end.

She sees the nest that can’t be toppled from the tree.

She sees the suffering we can’t skip, swallowed by certain sweetness every morning.

She sees her own imperfect life — her tail is still limp, her bladder needs help, her injuries will always echo — embraced for keeps, come what may.

So Prescott needs a permanent marker.

Prescott needs to tell the world that she has found the Big Story, in New Jersey of all places.

Prescott is writing a love letter to her life, its un-erasable grace and unconditional love.

In a world of pencil half-truths, Prescott has found the promise: you can be permanently safe.

Love lasts.

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