Interspecies

I was teaching a residency in Cincinnati living in a loft in Over the Rhine, our four cats transported from home from our gardens, our pine and white oak woods above the marsh— their paradise and ours. We were aliens in an alien land where names like Rosenberg were Germans, not Jews. We shopped in a farmers market that featured a hundred fifty ways to eat pig. We were sinking in scum green stagnant hours. We befriended a crazy woman for company. The zoo was walking distance. Every winter day I didn't teach we visited and soon we had made friends. The two snow leopards would run to the glass separating us, putting their paws up to our hands. They would rub like kitties against the barrier. I was not so stupid as to think without the thick glass we would romp together. But they and we were lonely, far from home, stuck in a place we didn't and couldn't belong.