Studio Visit

Working in my studio last night, I looked down, and discovered that Oliver had made a bed out of my fabric bin.

He's not a studio cat-he comes in only occasionally, to watch cars go past the window, or to steal a pompom, to beg for supper, or nurse his paws into a shopping bag full of brown fleece-(mother, mother, is that you? we imagine him saying). But this night he chose the bin of scraps, making a nest of felt, cotton swatches, black velvet, an embroidery of mushrooms and bees.

Every time I looked up from my work, he was expanding the boundaries of cuteness, testing the limits of what one poor human can absorb-

until he decided it would no longer do, and he was gone.