Today was warm, wet, muddy—winter wearing its spring coat. We opened the window in the kitchen a few inches while we were cooking, and I picked Zheli up in my arms to let her sniff the breeze that stole in. She nosed it like someone meeting a friend she wasn’t sure she recognized, quiet and curious and a little bit, I don’t know how to explain it exactly, like a child. I decided to move the jars of lentils and chillies and seeds off to the right of the sill, so that she’d have room to hop up on it if she wanted, and not a moment later there she was, head so far under the edge of the window that she was on the verge of getting wedged in. For half an hour or so she sat on the sill, watching and smelling that vast March night on the other side of the gap, not tense with excitement as she so often is, but deeply calm; she could have been hypnotized. Every now and then she turned around to call softly at me, a tiny mew full of wonder and uncertainty, like Have you smelled this? When she did so I could see that there was a smudge of dirt on the tip of her nose from the dirty sill. She looked very like a stray cast member from a stage production of Oliver Twist.

The other night I had a dream that three short essays I submitted to a literary journal were summarily rejected by email; the editor, whose tone was outraged, called them “cruel and degrading.” In the dream I understood this to mean not that their content was sordid, but that they were so wretchedly badly written as to render him mortified. I have not, as it happens, submitted anything to a literary journal lately, but when I awoke I knew why I had had that dream. I am working, as ever, to fulfill some kind of promise. Some days it is hard to tell whether it is a promise I made to myself, or one that was made to me. Either way, it is taking far longer than I had anticipated, and it is easy to grow discouraged.

On the other hand, the simple act of opening a window and making a little room for a cat on the sill is far more gratifying than anyone (but me) will ever tell you.