Whiskers in the Morning Sun

Margaret sat in her grandmother's rocking chair, the same one that had held three generations of bottoms, now creaking gently with her own rhythm. At eighty-two, she'd earned these quiet moments.

Her cat, a tortoiseshell named Blossom, jumped onto her lap. The same cat who'd appeared on her doorstep the morning after Henry's funeral—as if sent. Margaret stroked the soft fur, thinking about hair. How hers had gone from chestnut to silver, how Henry's had thinned until he was almost bald, yet he'd still run a comb through it every morning until the end.

"You're getting thin there too, aren't you, sweetie?" she murmured to Blossom, feeling a small bald spot forming behind the cat's ear. Just like Henry's.

On the side table sat the small pill organizer—Tuesday morning already. Her vitamin D, the one her doctor called sunshine in a bottle. Henry had never taken vitamins. Said real food was enough. But Margaret had started taking them when she turned sixty, some silly attempt to hold back time, as if a tiny yellow pill could keep her dancing at their granddaughter's wedding.

Now, here she was, still here, still taking her vitamins, while Henry was gone.

"We did good, didn't we?" she asked the cat, who purred in response. "Four children, seven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. That's our real legacy."

Blossom lifted her head, golden eyes seeming to understand. In the morning light streaming through lace curtains, Margaret saw it—the same copper highlights in the cat's fur that she'd seen in her own hair fifty years ago. The same copper that now appeared in her great-granddaughter's curls.

She popped the vitamin into her mouth and swallowed it with her tea. Not for herself anymore, but for the birthdays yet to come, for the moments when she'd be the one rocking babies in this chair, passing down stories the way her grandmother had passed down this chair, the way her mother had passed down the importance of taking care.

"That's right," she whispered, closing her eyes as Blossom settled deeper into her lap. "That's just right."