This past spring, I had an overwhelming desire to grow plants.  I started them as seeds in little seed starter flats in the window of the guest bedroom around mid-March.  I was quite the attentive parent.  I watered them and picked away the mold that sometimes appeared on the soil's surface.  I talked to them and praised them when I was proud of their growth.  I worried about them if they didn't grow or if they grew too much and I thought maybe they needed more dirt or maybe they wanted to be outside.  I grew some flowers and some herbs. 

Eventually I decided that the flowers were ready to be transplanted outdoors.  I bought nice dirt and planted them where I thought they would be comfortable.  They promptly died.  So, I bought some more seeds and planted them.  I watered them, but nothing seemed to be growing.  At the end of April, I left for a month in Africa and made my mother promise to continue watering my seeds even though it seemed pointless to just water dirt.  When I returned, the sweet pea seeds had turned into a tangled jungle of climbing, grasping plants. I decided to expand my garden and bought a huge bag of "Wildflower Mix" seeds.  This was, as it turns out, kind of a stupid idea.  As little plants started sprouting where I sprinkled the seeds, I realized that I couldn't tell the weeds from the good plants.  I had no idea what I was growing.  Eventually, I knew which plants I wanted to keep.  When blooms developed on the plants, I was a little disheartened to see that many of the blooms never opened.  There was a bush-like plant full of yellow flowers that stayed shut all the time, no matter how often I checked on it.  I pried open a bud with my fingers.  "See, doesn't that seem nice?  Don't you want to show the world your colors?"  The flower answered by slowly curling itself back shut.  One evening, after extensive googling, I realized that most of my garden's plants were night bloomers.  When they opened at night, the wind carried their fragrance to their main pollinators, the hawkmoths or the hummingbird hawkmoths (which are, incidently, freakin' weird as insects go).  After I learned that, I would often go out in the middle of the night to visit with my flowers, enjoy the scent, listen to the quiet chirp of insects, feel the cool night air. 

One night, I was out there, just where the light from the porch met the dark of night and I saw something move.  It was an animal and it was coming toward me in the dark.  I screamed and ran inside and slammed the door behind me.  As I tried to regain my cool, my dad appeared in the kitchen.  "Oh, I'm sorry, did I wake you with my screaming?  There was, there was...something outside."  "I didn't hear you scream, but it was probably just a raccoon or that cat that always hangs around the barn."  A cat.  Was it only a cat?  It moved like a cat.  And as I pondered this idea, I was staring out at the ground just outside the kitchen window.  Just then, a grey cat was illuminated by the light from our kitchen as it slinked by.  And so, I felt a little silly.

The next day, as I was pulling out on the highway right outside our house, I saw that cat again.  He was lying next to the median, dead.  I felt like it was somehow my fault.  Like maybe the cat, after listening to me scream, felt really bad about scaring me.  Maybe it got him to thinking about his life.  He thought, "Why am I such an outcast?  Some cats get to live inside with humans, but not me.  I hang out in a barn to get warm, but horses don't accept me.  And I try to make friends with humans and all I do is scare them.  Woe is me."  And that's when he decided that the pain of the world was just too much for his little cat shoulders to bear.  So, he stepped out on the highway with the purpose of ending it all.