Pandemic Still Lives:

J. brought the pandemic rescue puppies over. They were skinny and sick but overjoyed to poke around in the geraniums. The little one brought me a puzzle piece. Who knows how long that little bit of cardboard had been under the front porch. It was from a puzzle of the zodiac that my mother used to bring out on long snowy nights in the seventies, and we would piece together our zodiac signs. Transported in a shoe box, that puzzle went from the east to west coast, and then down the Pacific shoreline to me, and I haven't thought about it since my father died in 2014.  I choose this puppy, the puzzle piece safe in his soft mouth,  who brings me a gift of memory, the return of something lost.