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Recently I've written, Please excuse Stephen and Trevor for being tardy. Our dogs got loose and the boys helped me to round them up…

Another note read, Please excuse Stephen and Trevor for being absent. Our electricity went out during the night and so our alarms didn't go off.

And still another quite recent one said, Please excuse Stephen and Trevor for being tardy. Our cat Mugs gave birth to six kittens last night and we stayed with her until the early hours of the morning to make sure she was ok…

Most of the excuses I write for the boys approach truth; some are absolutely correct. Others, out of necessity, do juggle time, context. We know we've gone off the maps, off the maps and beyond the margins into that region where once the ancient cartographers wrote, Out here there be dragons.

The boys and I are still for a few minutes. Trevor's room has gone silent. Stephen hands the dead Mugs over to me, all the while petting her head. I hold her close. She is still warm, limp against my chest.

Our huge yard is knee-deep in leaves from our sycamores, maples, beeches. Lord knows when we'll get them raked. The gardens have dried up for the year. That sea of leaves rustles at the far dark corners where Mugsie's older offspring hunt mice or voles. We will wake to those prizes in the morning, our cats carrying their kills into the kitchen or right up the stairs and onto our pillows. November is a fruitful month for the hunters. Maybe that is what drew Mugs out. Tomorrow I'll collect the kills and set them on Mugs's grave.

Life is so big at our house, I'd like to write the attendance office. Sometimes it is very big. Do you understand.

We line the bottom of a dresser drawer with Stephen's old baby blankets, blankets that have somehow made the move with us from California to Missouri to Iowa to England to Maryland to Brookline and then Amherst. Several are hand-crocheted, gifts of fellow air force wives so many years ago.

The six tiny kittens curl up in one corner, a black-and-white swirl, their markings an amazing variation, as if one kitten had borrowed from the last some incidental trait, the incidental becoming all in the next, and so on.

Bette Davis, the only female, is black except for a tiny white spot on her right cheek, giving her the appearance of a chorus girl. Mugsie II has the identical markings of his mother. He is black except for white feet, and a white mask across his face.

The biggest at birth, whom Stephen names Einstein, is essentially white with black spots. He has a large black patch over one eye like a pirate. Then there is Ignaz, a gray-black tiger, and Badger, white with Ignaz's tiger stripes drawn beautifully, like a badger's mask, across his face.

The kitten Vasco DaGama is identical to the cat who impregnated Mugsie. We have seen the father in the woods behind our house, and later I see his picture at the vet's on an adopt-a-pet poster.

The vet has given the stray father a name, Rainier, as if he understands that this cat is surely the prince of Amherst, no doubt the father of much of the feral and domestic cat population in the area. He has an unforgettable face—his head is hooded in black, like an old flying ace. The rest of his face is white except for a black oval on his nose, and arched black brows.

So named by Charles, Vasco is always climbing up over his brothers and sister, out of the drawer onto the floor. There he lifts his little quivering blind head and, mewing furiously, struggles forward. When we get up through the night to feed the kittens, we often find Vasco a good distance from the drawer. We have gated the dining room against the dogs, but we worry that Vasco might stray near the mesh and wood partition and be swooped up by Rufus the basset hound.

After all, Rufus is a hound, by nature a hunter and a killer of small animals. From time to time he has picked up the scent of a rabbit and taken off baying, howling through the woods.

Rufus has caught and killed rabbits, moles,