The Spiritual Life of Animals and Plants

...her younger sister Marguerite who played piano for the silent movies, who ran onto their balcony and sang La Marseilles full voice as the German troops entered Strasbourg ...how her dear, beautiful mother and older sister had died taking care of the French soldiers in the nearby woods ...historic, truthful tales that enchanted me endlessly, so different from my life on earth ....and she would teach me songs in French and German, which we would sing everywhere, even walking down the street. Near the end of her life she had a favorite tree that she would sometimes talk to on her daily walks. She said that she just had this feeling that the tree understood what she was saying.

This all made perfect sense to me.

In any case, when I opened the package and took St. Anthony out of his travelling case, Figaro single-mindedly came into the kitchen and climbed into my lap. He sat there gazing at the statue, and then very slowly and very, very, very gently put his paw on St. Anthony''s heart. He left it there for quite some time and then looked at the statue for a few more moments, jumped down and went back to whatever he had been doing.

I open packages often, I receive all sorts of presents and scores and catalogue orders in the mail. Figaro was used to such things, I made no new noise or unusual motions with St. Anthony''s package; the string was cut with scissors and the tape was cut with the same knife I always used to open boxes. No, Figaro was drawn by what was in the package, before he could even see the contents, for he was in another room.