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Wishing well

Wishing well

Penny, love, do you know how you shine?

I can’t even say your name without that suffix, “love,” and that should tell you everything.

I started to write “Penny, my love,” but the word is too small.

You are my love only because you are our love. You are our love only because you are love.

This will not show up on your “23 And Me” report. Genetic analysis would declare you felis catus, domestic shorthair. You are calico, daubed in the same colors as a monarch butterfly.

Common knowledge says your species is earthbound. But dappled things reserve the right to fly. Your double helix reaches to the heavens. Your DNA is composed of devotion. You are nurture and nuzzles, all the way to your nucleotides.

You are made exclusively of love, for the exclusive purpose of love.

Sometimes, bodies get bewildered. Penny, love, it is no fault of yours that your belly once burbled. Your heart is a campfire that welcomes all who need warmth. Your eyes dance like candlelight at the sight of a friend. You have yet to meet anyone unworthy of that term.

Your diagnosis was “inflammatory bowel disease,” but there is grace for that, and prescription food, too. Penny, love, you know what it means to be fed. Other cats may arrive at Tabby’s Place ravening and wary, but you have come from love to love.

An angel dressed as a person held you close to her heart. She would not let you go until she was sure you would be adored. You would never have to endure a single hour of uncertainty.

And so, one butterfly-colored cat came to mend creatures turned grim by gravity.

Penny, love, your future has wings. Beyond all expectations, your tummy troubles have subsided. Prescription food is no longer necessary. The highway home is open. The only roadblock to adoption should be a traffic incident caused by all the hatchbacks and Astrovans and unicycles competing to get here first. The only note on your veterinary exam now is, “Chronic, acute, incurable love.”

Some would say you are “beautiful” and “highly adoptable.” They would not be wrong. But those words are too small for you. You are too crammed with honey to concern yourself with qualifications. Let the future unfurl in good time. This hour is where your love lives. Right here. No place but today.

Penny, love, we will take care of you like a calico cathedral.

We will honor your angel by ensuring you go from love, to love, to love, with no interruption.

We will see our own faces reflected in your shine.

We may even remember what we are made of, and learn to fly.

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