A few friends have inquired as to how the furry four-legged member of the Burt family is coping with having not been the center of attention in our household for the past eight weeks.

The two hairballs I’ve found in the past seven days sum up Miss Dorian Gray’s feelings. (My feelings on the hairballs are best summed up, “Seriously, Dorrie? Hairballs? Now? We’ve had you for four years and you’ve never had problems with this before. Did you feel left out of the part of life where I spend all my time cleaning up someone else’s puke?”)

(Question for the kitty mamas out there: Should I be worried that Dorrie has suddenly started having hairballs, or is this just part of the feline aging process?)

Before you click away in disgust, let me assure you that there is more to this story of Dorrie than slimy wet hairy bodily emissions. And I did not photograph them. (If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you might have been repulsed by one or two images last week.  Clearly I don’t know the limits of polite photo netiquette.)

Prior to the hairballs, I actually had the naïveté to think Dorrie was starting to like Liam. Sure, there was that moment last Saturday when she was sitting atop Mr. Burt’s dresser and I held Liam up to look at her, and her response to his intense, interested gaze was to hiss at him before backing away from him in terror. (Liam was unimpressed by this show of feline ferality.) But even hissing and cowering are behavior improvements. She’s long since gotten over her initial reaction of being pissed off at Mr. Burt for bringing this new pet into our home and her indifference to me, having realized she gets even less attention when she’s being disagreeable, and in addition to acting out the most pathetic bids for affection and attention (literally throwing herself at our feet), she’s lately begun to spend a lot of time in Liam’s room; I go in during the day to put his laundry away and find her curled up in the corner behind his door, or perched on top of the bookcase, staring at the crib — occasionally, while Liam is in there, napping. Or, if the door is shut, when I get up for the middle of the night feeding I often find her perched outside, waiting for me to open it.

Can you believe I actually harbored the notion that she was keeping watch over this little person whom she secretly liked and wanted to see?

Apparently, I’d begun to believe Dorrie was a dog.

It wasn’t until I went to wake Liam on one of the mornings he hadn’t actually woken me that I remembered Dorian Gray is, very much, a cat.

The bedroom door was already open when I got there, presumably pushed open by Dorrie (the house has settled in such a way that you have to pull the door just so for it to latch shut), who was sitting on the bookcase. Looking not at Liam, but at the window.

Or rather, through the slats of the blinds in the window.

Watching something outside the window.

With her hackles raised.

And making soft chattering sounds.

As she does when she watches…

…birds.

Doves, to be precise.

As you may recall, a pair of doves call our window ledges home each spring. Usually it’s the downstairs powder room window, which is concealed by a Yaupon Holly tree, but this year our doves’ nest and two eggs are ensconced in the ivy covering the nursery window. (I think it’s lovely that new life is beginning so near to where my baby sleeps and am convinced the mama dove knew this and chose it as an auspicious location to hatch her little ones.)

(Less lovely is the fact that the room where my baby sleeps is also the staging point for the violent act of destroying new life my cat longs to carry out, but there’s a life lesson in that, too. Namely, the ever-present reality of the food chain.)

I’ll let Dorrie keep thinking she’s on top for as long as she can.

Soon, Liam will be crawling.

…at least until tomorrow, when the high temperature is going to be a good twenty degrees below today’s high temperature.  Of course, it was 85ish today, and I do realize that 65ish isn’t exactly winter weather.  However, unlike today, I will not be lying out on a blanket in a linen skirt and spaghetti strap top for six hours if the high is only 65ish.  (Maybe I’ll lie out on a blanket in jeans and a light jacket.  My mildly sunburned shoulders and upper back would probably appreciate that.)

But I think someone once said not to worry about tomorrow, so for now I’m going to focus on today, and the fact that while out on my morning jog, I noticed that amid the brown barrenness of winter, things are wick.

Such as the Bradford pear trees:

The cherry’s also a-bloom:

As is our next-door neighbor’s pink magnolia, which I can see from my kitchen window, but had to stand on one of the patio chairs to snap a picture:

Lilies are starting to sprout, though I doubt they’ll be blooming in time for Easter:

The irises are coming up, too:

Trimmed all the way back for winter, in just a few weeks, the rose bushes are thick with new growth.  (I love the deep red.)

Here and there are even little bursts of colorful bloom:

And daffy daffodils sway in the breeze:

For those of you who have real winters, I’m sure the signs of spring are even more affecting than for those of us who live in milder climates.  (I’m thinking of Alyssa in Illinois, who has been clinically diagnosed as in hibernation, and my in-laws in Minnesota, who are having a snowstorm, and my favorite author Neil Gaiman, who blogged today about digging a van out of a snowbank.)  Yet even though I haven’t experienced much of a winter by any definition, I couldn’t be kept indoors today.  I wanted to soak up the sun, to be surrounded by reminders that life doesn’t stay the same all the time, that it’s a constant cycle of change and rebirth and growth — and that I’m a part of that cycle.

This time last year, I was muddling along writing a short story a month to try and break myself of the winter of uncreativity that followed the completion of my first novel.  But when spring came, the flowers bloomed, and so did an idea that is now a novel of 70,000 words and counting.  (By the time I finish the first draft, I anticipate it being at something like 150,000 words and subtracting — because I think about half those words need to be edited out.)

It’s not a brilliant novel.  It’s just a romantic comedy — well, maybe a romantic comedy.  While it’s funny, I’m not sure it exactly falls into the comedy category.  But I can’t really call it a romance, either, because it’s not full of bodice ripping and torrid sex.  I guess it’s really just chick-lit.  Hopefully smart chick-lit.  But I’ll settle for chick-lit, if it means I have an audience.  That’s one of the things I’ve realized from last spring to this spring, one of the changes I’ve undergone from writing my first novel to working on this novel:

I don’t have to write something important.  I just have to write something important to me.

And so I’m writing a novel that takes place at my alma mater, Baylor University.  It’s about a pianist and a singer.  It’s about past relationships and the hold they have on us.  It’s about difficult friendships.  It’s about the ways people cope with those things — religion, drugs, relationships, music.  It’s about dreams, and goals, and compromise.  It’s about love.  (Between a young woman and a slightly older man, because, I’ll admit it, those are the kinds of pairings I always go for when I read.)  All things that are important to me.  And, I hope, important to enough other people that I can get a publisher’s advance and a few royalty checks.

Today I chose to spend six hours outside, listening to the classical radio station on my mp3 player, scribbling ten pages of a notebook to bring a couple of imaginary people to life.  Not because I’m destined to be the next Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, but because I’m lucky enough to get to do what I want to do.

Today, I think I did it well.