Welcome Echoes in Flowers and Dancing Lights

June 2, 2026 Bernadette

A little bit of perspective on where it's placed. — A little bit of perspective on where it’s placed.

This week I’m featuring just some things from this week, little visits maybe, memories of annual blooms and annual activities with Mimi and Mewsette, echoes of circumstances and memories. And Mr. Sunshine’s flower makes an appearance too. He just won’t be left out.

Last Saturday I was working in my flower bed just outside the picket fence from the vegetable garden, tucking some sunflower seeds into the soil behind the young borage plants that are eager to attract the pollinators to their sweet blossoms, pollinators that will also do their good work on the future cherry tomato and cucumber blossoms through the picket fence in the salad garden.

That’s the picket fence where Mr. Sunshine’s flower is attached and has been spinning in sometimes gusty breezes lately, tattered as it is. When I stood up from my planting and looked around, Mr. Sunshine’s flower right in front of me, the flower was facing me. It’s been facing the other way, into the garden, for all the years it’s been on the fence, but on this late afternoon the flower turned all the way around facing the side yard that had been the backdrop of the photo I’d taken of him and Mimi and Giuseppe.

Mr. Sunshine's flower is watching over me. — Mr. Sunshine’s flower is watching over me.

I’ve never seen it turned around since I put it there in 2022, not even temporarily, not even after mighty storms summer and winter. But I guess Mr. Sunshine was keeping an eye on me, as he often did, as I often need. A clever little visit.

The Dancing Lights, May 28 2026

My notes from that morning in my pet loss journal…

When I stepped out onto the deck to look at the back yard this morning as I’ve done nearly every morning since I’ve lived here, I walked toward the steps looking over the railings to see more and more of the back yard appear below. The sun was just about to come over the trees, casting dappled light on the garden and deeper shadows at the end of the yard.

Movement in the grass along the edge of the garden caught my attention, not the sun dapples, not movement from an animal or bird or insect, but flickering, moving light, even among the sun dapples.

It was Mewsette’s dancing lights in the grass along the edge of the garden where I’d seen them just a few days after she died in 2023, greeting me once again as the sun hit the spinner on the windchime hanging on the corner of the deck. The lights I’d never seen before that day although I walk out on the deck every morning and the windchime has hung at that corner of the deck since a month after I moved in.

On this morning the light flickered in longish streaks across the grass, moving up and down the edge, then almost all the way to the brick patio at the top of the garden. The time and angle have to be just right for the lights to play in the grass, and this was one of those mornings.

Later that morning, in the kitchen, the dancing lights were on the ceiling right above the cabinet where they had all gathered, the windchime spinner catching the sun and reflecting it under the deck roof and through the kitchen window.

The next morning when I went to stand at the top of the steps and look at the yard, the dancing light was moving on the step below me, right below my feet. Mimi, walking ahead of me, pausing on that first step, something she often did, as below where she’s rubbing her face on the edge in May 2024.

Mimi on the step below where I usually stood, rubbing her face in May 2024.

This time the lights were elusive and were gone by the time I got any camera to capture them, but here is the video I made for Mewsette in 2023, and below that the dancing lights that visited after I’d lost Mimi in August 2024.

And here are Mimi’s dancing lights…

~~~

Mimi in Pink

The course of blooming flowers over the past month reminds me of all the outdoor time Mimi and Mewsette and I enjoyed through the years. The rhododendron put on quite a show this year and each day I could feel Mimi out there on the front porch with me. She loved it out there, it was like her private space. She loved Mewsette, but she cherished her child-free time lazing on the front porch, scratching on her scratching tree and stalking things in the ground covers. In 2024 she was not as active as she had been, but she loved the naps just as much. I made sure to capture her in some of those naps and never used the photos, though I’ve gone back and looked at them and remembered her.

She settled on the rocker, I settled the flowers around her, just to get some beautiful photos of her.

And the purple rocker

Settled, relaxed, asleep.

The purple rocker has been in this spot since way before I moved the other rocker out onto the front porch, and Mimi was on it likely the first time she was out there. Not only did she nap on it, she also used it as a step ladder to get to the bird bath where she got her drinks and looked at herself reflecting in the water. She was very tired in her last few months, so she sought all her favorite napping spots as often as she could. This rocker would do, and she got up, turned around a few times, laid down, relaxed a little, curled up and put her head down. I crouched near with my zoom lens on my camera to get the photos I knew I might never have the opportunity to get again.

Now the rocker is ready to be sent off to the back yard to have its paint weathered off, then in time the wood goes into the compost bin where it breaks down to feed our hungry garden. I purchased that rocker a year or so before I moved here in 1990, later painting it.

From 2024, “Reclaiming My Garden”

Mimi was instrumental in me having a garden again, and though I didn’t really get it together until July that year I started the reclaim in May when Mimi was cruising the paths. I’m sharing it again because, like the images and stories above, I’m remembering this time as it echoes down to this year, thinking of Mimi constantly as I spend so much time out there.

black cat on garden path — Mimi supurrvises my work in reclaiming my garden

An essay about handwork facilitating creative thought, finding inspiration in nature, and planting your grief in a beloved place so that grief can grow into beloved memories each time you visit.

I’m a little behind again—this was intended to be my Sunday post. There really are only 24 hours in a day and I’m unreasonable about what I can actually accomplish each day…

I had planned this reclaim of my garden and Mimi was part of the reason I wanted to get to it sooner than later even though I’ve already got so many other things to do that require keeping my hands clean and spending time indoors. I’ve been observing her since we lost Mr. Sunshine, concerned about her slow movements, her lack of appetite, her downcast aspect that seemed to indicate some pain, and most of all sometimes lack of interest in things she has always loved like cruising around the garden, visiting her wicker and Mewsette’s garden chairs, and finding a sunny place to nap.

Recently she’s been feeling much better as I think we’ve got medications and herbs and fluids all in the right amounts and order for her and she’s been much more active. But even though she wanted to walk the garden paths, she couldn’t! They were so overgrown that she got caught in some tight spots and and to turn around to find her way out, and in time she couldn’t even get in there from any angle. So not only did I want to honor the memory of Mewsette and her siblings and all the garden cats who came before, and I want not only my vegetables and flowers but also my exercise, my inspiration and my thinking space, I also wanted Mimi to have her very similar activities in our garden.

I finally found the purrfect sunny morning to get the reclaiming started. As soon as I fell into the rhythm of leaning, kneeling, pulling and cutting the overgrowth my thoughts began producing words in rhythm with my work. I set up my phone to record my thoughts as voice to text, which came in phrases and sentences. Usually this is scattered, incomplete, with blank moments while I’m looking for a word. I immediately knew I’d want to write an essay, at least, to share these thoughts.

To my surprise, when I went to work over my thoughts to organize and refine what I’d said I changed and added very little, keeping the rhythm and structure and nearly all the very words I’d recorded. I’m not sure which needed to be done more, cleaning up my garden or releasing those thoughts. Both, I know, and the very work itself capacitated the words and their organization. I recorded the finished essay and created a video including the photos and short videos I took as I worked, adding other of my photos and artwork to illustrate the words.

For now this video is only up on my Substack profile and I probably won’t get it up on YouTube until the weekend. I posted it there first for the absence of distractions for you while reading and me while working, unlike YouTube, which I love, but I sometimes have a difficult time focusing and that’s one of the ways I run out of hours in the day. In the past I would have looked at the garden and said it could wait, I would have considered the essay and maybe taken notes but not taken the time for it. At this point in life I feel like my life would be less for not doing the work and writing. I try not to do that anymore.

You can click on the embed below and and watch it on Substack with no need for an account on that platform. I have the text of the essay I recorded for the video below and on Substack, so you can read it here and go and watch, go to Substack and read and watch, or wait until I get it up on YouTube.

Reclaiming My Garden by Bernadette E. Kazmarski

An essay about handwork facilitating creative thought, finding inspiration in nature, and planting your grief in a beloved place so that grief can grow into beloved memories each time you visit.

Read on Substack

Pet Loss in the First Person

From the time I began writing about my experiences in pet loss, relating what I was feeling and thinking about it as I moved through grief, readers have thanked me, often in private, for my honesty, grateful to know another shared their feelings as they moved through grief, or helped them make a decision.

Little visits

You never know where the messages will come from or how the visitor will appear to you. But they will. They love and care about you as they did in life and still want to be near you.

Thank you for following our grief journey after losing three members of our feline family.

I hope sharing our experiences have helped you in some way, as sharing my experiences with you helps me.

You can read all the articles related to their loss by tapping one of these images in the side bar and in articles.

Read more articles about Pet Loss in the First Person, my personal losses, about Pet Loss and other Essays on The Creative Cat.

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It’s Mimi napping in the shadow on the cool bricks among the geraniums, near the vintage aluminum tub where I grow pole beans. Read more and order.

Copyright

All images and text used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission, although links to your site are more than welcome and are shared. Please ask if you are interested in using and image or story in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of an image or a product including it, check my animal and nature website Portraits of Animals to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.