With a bustle Cerise starts her day
There’s a bustle about Cerise this morning. She bounced off the bed at 7.30 a.m. as I was still sipping my coffee. She came around and sat herself on the cream sheepskin rug at my side of the bed. Then sat and stared up at me with eyes like lustrous jet, radiant, intense, impossible to ignore.
It’s taken her a long time, years, to hold eye contact, never mind to stare me out with more than a hint of hustle across her face. She wanted to get me out of bed and this was her way.
In and out of the bedroom she went, claws clipping along the corridor’s wooden floor, her jaunty Sunday morning mood heard with every single bouncy step. Back along she came, then stood a moment in the bedroom doorway looking at me, I’m sure with disappointment. Disappointment that her best efforts had failed to get me out of bed to follow her downstairs
This demanded a new tatic. Cue Albert Claude. He is not an early bird if he’s given a choice and he was still trying to sleep, curled in his bed, a twitching eyebrow and half a wink suggesting he wasn’t succeeding. The liveliest of all the dogs once he’s awake, like a teenager he’s usually last to rise. It’s ironic when he spends a lot of each day rushing around, pushing himself into his sisters’ faces. Now it was time for Cerise to dish that back and into his bed she sprang, landing fully on her brother with a burst of energy more often seen from him than her. A snort of badly suppressed laughter from me caused her to pause, look up, back down and decide to leave him be, to go it alone. She knew she could get me out of my bed if she didn’t give up.
Bustling herself out the soft depths of his bed, she sprang back up onto mine. Sitting at my feet, she locked eyes with me before tipping her head back and with ears trembling with excited energy, out of her mouth came a high pitched woof, rich with a glee I never thought I’d hear from Cerise.
She is ready to tell me what she wants me to do for her. What she needs me to do. She is out of her shell. So full of confidence this morning that who was I to ignore this newly found bossiness?
There’s a bustling bossiness about Cerise today and long may it last.
I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.
Frida Khalo
