My kids are both working and taking courses in the city this summer, so I have been in New York during the week, and only in Connecticut on weekends. Most people try to leave the city in the summer, but it’s my favorite time to be here. No crowds, no lines at the movies. No need to make reservations at your favorite restaurants – there’s always a table available.

We live downtown and I have to walk through Soho to get anywhere. Soho, as you probably know, was once a very quaint area, below Houston Street, where artists had converted lofts into studios and it used to be a very bohemian scene. Now, it’s a tourist trap. It still has very quaint, cobble-stone streets and cool old buildings, but, especially in the summer, you will have a hard time finding another American walking the streets there. It’s all Europeans. Two years ago, when the dollar was at an all-time low, these Europeans were literally filling hefty bags with their loot from Gucci and Prada. I watched them throwing our dollars around like Monopoly money. Now, they’re still flocking to Soho, but they don’t seem to be spending as much. Still, at least twenty times a day, I am asked, by very beautiful people, in very broken English, the exact same question: “Where …..is…the Chinatown?” I have actually started just blurting out directions to Chinatown, the minute a gorgeous Italian, French or Swedish person approaches me. I don’t know why they all want to go there. But they do.

The city, in the summer, is also quite colorful. Yesterday, I wandered through the Union Square Farmer’s Market, where farmers from upstate, and other areas, bring their offerings. I walked by all the stands once, then turned back and walked by again. The fragrances!

Fresh baked bread, scones, cinnamon rolls. Cheeses. Crates and crates of freshly picked beets, squash, onions, scallions. And the berries! Strawberries and blueberries everywhere you look! It’s the season, I guess, The farmers are the friendliest people and urge you to try their strawberries and sample their muffins. Yum.
Then I cut through Washington Square Park on my way home. Washington Square Park has just undergone a two-year long renovation and it’s more beautiful than I have ever seen it. I gazed at these hostas and silently cursed the sinister, roaming herds of Connecticut deer that devour ours.

I love these flowers, which I call “Black-Eyed Susans.” I know they have a latin sounding name as well.

It was a hot day and children were running through the fountain, or chasing each other around screaming, pop-sickle juice dripping down their little chins. I got a little weepy recalling the bygone childhoods of my own kids who are both, now, taller than me. I say it and I sound like an old lady, but …it goes by so fast.

On Thompson Street, every afternoon, this fellow takes in the sun:

Now, I don’t want any comments about how cruel it is to tether a cat. This guy purrs happily on his little cardboard box that he sometimes uses as a scratching post, sometimes a bed. Most of the time, he does what I like to do – watch all the people go by.

I spent the day holed up in my office and made the mistake, once again, of working until it was dark. It just gets dark so early now. I hate going up to our horse barn to feed the beasts at night because the barn is so dimly lit and I keep seeing mice flitting about. One ran up the wall of a stall that I was leaning against the other night! I have to get a new barn cat.

It wasn’t completely dark when I got up there tonight and I was able to get this shot of the sunset.

My internet ramblings have led me to some great leads in the barn cat search. Right now, this cat “Burger” is my top choice. I think he’d have my barn rodent free in no time. What do you think?

What is it about male orange cats? Our poor departed Sneakers was a very angry fellow as well. But he was a great, great mouser.

Somebody recently told me that my blog is getting a little too doggy. In fact, I’ve been working very hard on this book and sometimes I don’t feel a lot of energy for blogging and so a dog blog is always easy. I’m trying to write about love (every day I’m trying to write about love), and so I’ve been reading all these poems of Pablo Neruda. Anyway, today I came across this sexy cat poem, for all you cat lovers.

If you like this, and you think you can handle it, tomorrow I will post a very, very sexy poem.

Cat’s Dream
by Pablo Neruda

How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
sleeps with all the rings–
a series of burnt circles–
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-colored tail.
I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams.
I have seen how the cat asleep
would undulate, how the night
flowed through it like dark water;
and at times, it was going to fall
or possibly plunge into
the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
like a tiger’s great-grandfather,
and would leap in the darkness over
rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.
Sleep, sleep cat of the night,
with episcopal ceremony
and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams;
control the obscurity
of our slumbering prowess
with your relentless heart
and the great ruff of your tail.

For some reason, everywhere I turn, somebody is mentioning Best Friends Animal Society to me. I’ve been laid up so have been watching Dogtown on National Geographic Channel, which features the Best Friends sanctuary (my friend Juliet is the producer of Dogtown). A woman from my town recently gave me a pamphlet about Best Friends. Several of my blog readers have emailed me about it – one, dear Lisa, even made a donation in memory of Pongo and Sneakers. So today I went on the Best Friends website with the idea of making a donation and perhaps finding a barn cat as well.

Unfortunately, I cannot visit the site of any rescue organization without checking out the dogs. I don’t mean to blow my own horn here, but I have an uncanny eye for a good dog, even online. I found our Lulu at a rescue organization in Louisiana and just based on her pictures and some careful questions to her caretakers, I knew she would be a perfect dog for us, and she has been. I’ve also helped friends find great dogs.

So today, I decided to do an “Ann’s Picks” of the dozens of adoptable dogs featured at “Best friends.” If I could have another dog, it would be one of these. First, allow me to introduce Queenie:

I almost can’t bear to report to you that poor Queenie was kept chained in somebody’s yard until Katrina hit and she was rescued and has been in shelters ever since. She’s supposed to have a nice temperment, but, of course wary. I would say only if you have no kids for this one.

Okay, brace yourself. This is gorgeous Kenicke!

Unfortunately he’s older and has some health issues. But wouldn’t you like to spend his last few years with him, if only to admire his movie star looks?

And here’s my pick of the day. Meet Debo. He was hit by a semi-truck. And he’s fine, except for a slightly curved spine. I love a muscle dog and this guy takes the cake. He’s supposed to be super friendly, but he’s a Staffordshire (Pitbull) terrier and shouldn’t be anywhere near cats. This dog looks like he has a lot of energy to burn and unless you need a running companion to help you train for a marathon, I wouldn’t keep him in an apartment. You could sleep quite well at night with a guy like Debo protecting the house.

And, after looking at the cats I determined that I’ll try to find our barncats a little closer to home. But this is exactly the kind of cat I’m looking for. His name is Bogart. He looks like a character.

Cats are so freaky. I really am a dog person. Here’s “Mrs Crinkles.” Is it me, or is that a weird cat?

And finally, this hefty guy just made me so sad because he reminds me of our Sneakers:

I’ve not been able to see my horses, except from a distance, since my surgery. I can walk to the top of the hill, and then I’m tired and must walk back to the house. But I’m told we need a new cat. The mice have taken over the barn, now that Sneakers has departed. They’ve been in the house too, the filthy buggers, skitting about our countertops, leaving their black scornful droppings everywhere. When we trap them now, I have no mercy – I used to feel sorry for them. Once, Coco, our resident elf, got caught on a sticky trap, the poor thing, so now we leave the traps under the stove. The spring traps just don’t work. Seriously, if you’re one of the mouse-rights people, please don’t email me. Their spongy paws skip across my silverware, their beady little eyes are probably watching me now. They don’t need your help.

But I won’t have a housecat because I’m allergic. And I’m not really a cat person. So I must find one of these agencies that places semi-feral cats to people with barns. I’m told the mice are climbing the walls of the barn. They’re gorging themselves on grain and then some of them commit suicide in the horse’s water buckets. We have a heated room with a kitty door. We have horses who are very fond of cats, and dogs who have been trained to have a fearful reverence. So, I’m a little excited to get well enough to drive so I can go cat hunting.

If any of you know of an agency that places barn cats, please let me know. Most rescue organizations won’t place cats in homes where they won’t be living indoors. We want a cat who doesn’t want to live indoors. Like our old Sneakers. Sneakers would only come down to the house on weekends when we overslept. He had a loud meow that sounded like a human “Hello.” More like “Relloooooooooooowwwwwwww?” “RELLOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW?”

He would say this over and over again until I came staggering out in my pajamas.

We decided that the other barn animals sent him down as an envoy – a sort of emissary, since he had managed to master an English sounding word (and was the only one not fenced in). Once he woke me, he would swagger up to the barn at my heel, just in case I had any ideas of stalling. He would never come in the house but whenever I got the vent going above our stove he’d appear on my windowsill and I would serve him piles of bacon or grilled cheese or whatever I was grilling and he would purr and gobble simultaneously and then he would just stay there for awhile, sunning himself, his eyes heavy lidded, his belly full. I’m not a cat person, but he was some cat. You miss a cat like that.

Blogger’s note: Sneakers has been missing for weeks. We found his remains yesterday. A coyote got him, as we suspected. I miss him terribly. He had this weird meow that sounded like a human voice and he used to follow me around the barn muttering things at me that I couldn’t entirely understand. I understood his tone, though. Sometimes he was cheerful and just chit-chatty. Other times, he was cranky and insistent. You really miss a cat like that. So this post is a reprint, it originally ran in April.

Meet Sneakers. Sneakers is our barn cat. He may look cuddly, but he’s not. Trust me. I know him well. In order to survive, I’ve had to learn to interpret his every expression and anticipate all his needs. In the photograph above, he’s saying, “Put the cat food down …and nobody gets hurt.” He is the king of the barn and has trained me, and all other humans who enter his kingdom, to treat him with a fearful reverence.

Sneakers has his own apartment in the barn. It’s a tackroom that we keep heated for him all winter long. He has a little swinging door through which he enters and exits his apartment, and in which he is liable to get stuck if he doesn’t do something about his ballooning weight.

Sometimes in the mornings, if I am very sleepy, I start feeding the horses before I have offered Sneakers his breakfast. Sneakers corrects me when I do this. He always asks politely first. He purrs and rubs against my ankle once, purrs and rubs against my ankle twice, and if I don’t drop the grain buckets and race to get his food, he dig his claws and teeth into my leg and tries to flay my flesh into ribbons. I have scars from this. I’m fully trained now, so he only has to purr and rub my ankle once and I obediently flip open a cat food can and present it to him with a flourish.

Denis has a hockey rink near the barn and sometimes he needs to hook up hoses to the faucet in the barn. Sometimes one of his hockey buddies will offer to do this and the guys allow him, because it’s always funny to see a big hockey guy come running, screaming from the barn with a hissing, spitting cat attached to his shin guards.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.