A line came to me in a dream last night, words that I read, that floated up illuminated all of a piece like a message in an inky eight-ball. As I came to the surface, floating awake, I managed to capture the line that seemed to me even in my dreams to be meaningful and coherent, and even as it instantly vanished I willed myself to memorize it. Later I jotted it down. "There's a satanic refinement to a sadist's delight." Hunh. There's been a thread of cruelty throughout. My subconscious seems to understand that better than does my ingenuous wakeful side. It's not the same as a cat toying with a mouse or bird. Cats are amoral but I don't expect them to have any capacity for morality.

But all that was later, after dawn. In the wee hours, around quarter to five I leaped out of bed when I heard a yowling catfight outside. I went downstairs, out onto the porch and down the steps, calling after Gwynnie and Rafe. Gwynnie zoomed in - I think she's the one who'd gotten entangled - and Rafe appeared soon after, roused from a different direction - yo what are you doing up, he seemed to ask as he sleepily came up to greet me.

I stood outside in my underwear and sandals, legs bare as a Rockette, microfiber fleece thrown on for warmth and decency. It was beautiful out, predawn but surely near the cutoff of astronomical night, cinematic stars filling the clear black sky, to the south Orion and his belt - and then some - three bright stars in suggestive line - below the line - clearly visible. So easy to anthropomorphize that constellation. I noticed it in my grogginess, and even in grogginess was incredulous. Had I noticed those three stars before, ever? What must the ancient Greeks have thought - just the same as me, I imagined. Unmistakeably phallic. I lingered for a few moments gazing up at the cosmic dust of the Milky Way, marveling, before going back to bed.

I had been wondering about an odd, unpleasant detail I'd read in the Lyndall Gordon that E.D. apparently on at least one occasion drowned some kittens - in a vat of pickle juice, as I recall, or am I making that up? Anyway. I had wondered about that. Even if she was like a "loaded gun" that seemed quite proactively destructive. Even as a crude form of feline population control I couldn't quite reconcile E.D.'s committing such a quick, brutal act.

But someone on the Secret Life of E.D. facebook page offered an explanation that instantly made sense to me: E.D. loved birds so much that the thought of cats so wantonly instantly destroying them was very upsetting to her. Birds trumped kittens.

I remembered a small incident one evening last winter. I was home, there was snow on the ground, I stepped out on the porch for some reason, perhaps to glance up at the stars. And I saw a small dead bird lying on the porch and the cats, Claire I think, looking all smug. It was such a shock to me to see this tiny perfectly intact beautiful little bird. It's as though it had dropped dead - it wasn't mauled in any way, it didn't seem to me. I blamed the cats and honestly, for an instant felt murderous towards them (not acted on in the slightest way, mind you, but just so helpless and angry), but at the same time it seemed so odd that there would be a tiny dead bird on the porch after dark. Perhaps the cats weren't to blame, they don't actually seem that into birds, they're more mousers.

I remember the bird as being perfectly beautiful - and blue in color. I think I immediately associated it with E.D. It was night, and it was cold, and god knows I'd had at least one glass of wine at that hour, but I took a trowel and eased the tiny corpse onto it and took it into the vegetable patch and placed it on top of a shoebox sized planter that D had constructed in which we had planted carrots. I placed the peaceful, perfect little bird on top of the cap of snow on what now seemed to be - or instantly became - its coffin. The bird looked beautiful there, in a way, a perfect deceased being laid on the snow. I wished for it to be able to repose there, decompose, so I think (I don't remember clearly after all this time) may have laid over it some evergreen branches and leaves.

It's funny, the bird has become anthropomorphized for me - I picture it smiling in closed-eyed repose, strange how in my imagination it merges with some illustrated image of E.D.

I know I sound crazy. I don't mean to. I'm perfectly fine. It's just that even as the instant unfolded that freezing dark night, it felt poetic and profound right then. I knew that I needed to write about it, but it was so strange, and came to me all at once, that I didn't quite know how to start - so I never did, until now.

Women of Note is on now, with the wonderful Jerrice and her inspired selections. I wonder if it was a Sunday evening that I found this poor little bluebird. It may have been. I don't think the cats had killed it. But for some reason it - this poor lost bird - wound up on our porch, for me to find, and relate to, and interpret, and lay to rest in the crunching snow and the freezing air and the porch light on and the stars blazing in the bright winter sky.