Posters for lost cats appear in the neighborhood, now and then stapled to the telephone polls. Oreo….

Posters for lost cats appear in the neighborhood, now and then stapled to the telephone polls. Oreo. Sparkles. Bongo. A cat slips off, joins up with the raccoons and coyotes, makes a wild way of things. It happens. Then yesterday, in front of a grand brick apartment building across from the river on Memorial Drive, a little laminated sign hung from a low bush. “LOST: Have you seen me?” read the sign with a photograph below of a bonsai tree, delicate and elegant, gnarling out of a grey ceramic pot with what looked like tiny bay leaves spiking from the branches. Below the photo, an explanation: On December 27th, someone walked off with two small bonsai trees that had been left briefly on the sidewalk. “Those trees were not free,” the poster reads. “I think it was a big misunderstanding,” with a smiley face emoji. They’re a fragile species, wrote the owner, he wants them back, and leaves his cell and email. “No questions asked, no worries!” The first floor bay window on the corner is a forest of bonsai trees. I see the tiny trees on night walks when the window glows. Maybe these two slipped off to join the mighty sycamores that they’ve seen from their perch in the window. Maybe they fled further, running on their roots, to grow in a deeper set of woods, with the raccoons and the coyotes and all the missing cats.

[Image: from Views of Instructions for Bonsai along the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Utagawa Yoshishige, 1848.]