A hummingbird’s wing on the mat near the cat food bowls too tardily filled is a morning heartache, as was the tiny squirrel tail weeks ago.  “It must have been a baby,” said the neighbor who had lately asked me to trim my brush below in my lower lot that has been a refuge for squirrels. They climb over the wall, across his broad expanse of lawn, to intrude onto his high terrace porch. They dine on his nuts set out for guests. Nibble the flowers in his flower boxes.

I offered him the tail as a gift from my cats, but he flinched and rejected their offering. The means to our ends are not always the choices we would make, but nature bows neither to mercy nor wishes. Things happen that other things may happen after them. Death births progress. Progress sometimes ironically breeds death.

Life is a circle even though our own pursuit of it may be a line—winding or straight, even or jagged. Seen in the great expanse of things, if such things could be seen, a molecular part in the circle that is beyond our imagining.

Too late, I scoop the kibble into their bowls. Take the small tail rejected as an offering and tuck it into an arrangement on my windowsill that it may continue to serve as part of the beauty of this world.