Janey

We got Jane in March of last year after seeing a picture of her sent in an email: small, scared, blank and brown. Tabby. Eyes of green that were not a window to anything in particular, but perhaps her fear.
We took her out of her carrier and Jones hissed and hissed around her while she sat blinking as if into the midday sun, disoriented and afraid.
Weeks were spent under furniture where we couldn't reach her. Sometimes we'd catch her sitting on the sofa and we'd pull her onto our lap where she would sit, unmoving, unresponsive for long periods of time.
Jane had spent the first five months of her life in a parking garage at USC, which is near downtown Los Angeles. People left food for her and that is the only way she survived. How she managed NOT to get hit by a moving car is a mystery to me, but when I think of her there in the cold and dark my heart breaks even now.
You see, she has become a dynamo of sweetness and even when she's playing she acts as an angel at all times. Janey pibbers in a kind of bird language and only meows when she sees a bug or if Anthony and I are in the creative room, to which the door is always closed. If you visit and you hear a thin, high strangled sound as though an injured baby pteradactyl has landed in our home, that is Janey complaining that we've been away too long behind closed doors.
As the months pass she becomes more playful, more curious about our visitors and apt to offer them her cheek in record time.
She makes me ache with love. When Anthony goes to put on his shoes in the morning, she knows it's time to get petted and jumps up on his lap, purring like a rusty motorboat, jumping up and down to mush his feet with her cheek and forehead over and over again, each time more awkward and loving than the last. This is our Janey, the brave and cautious love of our lives.