THE RIGHT DOOR

There's a cat who has decided to live with us.

We didn't decide this together. There was no discussion, no trip to pick him out, no moment when we said, I think we should get another cat. Someone left him here, and apparently he took a look around and decided we would do.

This afternoon I found him sitting outside the porch door, looking in.

The sun was coming through the trees behind him in that dappled way it does toward the end of summer, when the light suddenly seems more golden than it did a week ago. There was a single leaf on the porch behind him.

I took a picture.

Not because anything was happening. Mostly because he looked so handsome sitting there, waiting to be let in.

But when I looked at the photograph afterward, I felt something I couldn't quite explain.

It looked like fall.

Not autumn with pumpkins on the steps and leaves piled along the road. The very beginning of it. The part you almost miss. One leaf. A change in the light. An evening that gets dark a little earlier than you expected.

And this cat at the door.

Maybe it was the door that got me.

A few weeks ago he didn't belong to anyone. He had no reason to believe that if he sat on the other side of a door and waited, someone would eventually open it.

Now he does.

I suppose that's what made the picture feel like home.

Not the porch. Not the pretty light. Not even that one perfect leaf.

Just knowing which door to wait beside.