and Cloudy do not wake up all
at the same time.
Nor do they eat together or
play together.

They are all who Ron and I imagine
them to be in our future home world,
the one in which we have room
for Armour, the pug, Waylon, the cat
and Cloudy, the ferret.

After his first Gulf War service was shortened
by returning home to nurse his dying father,
Ron acquired a ferret he named Sonny.

There could never be another Sonny. But, there could, to reference
THE FRENCH CONNECTION, a Cloudy, one who would be as intuitive a pet
as his predecessor.

Waylon, a tough cat named for Waylon Jennings, would watch over us all
as we slept in with little Armour Henry, the pug we want to find to adopt.

That’s our small menagerie that resides in our imagination,
but, within the next months, will develop real form.