I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

When I graduated with my MFA, more than 20 years ago now, I taught at Gettysburg College.

The town was full of college students, plus a constant influx of tourists and history buffs

who wanted to see the Civil War battlefields.

I was hired on a one-year appointment for an up-and-coming writer, which meant I had to find a

place to live for that academic year. Luckily, a professor in another department was leaving for the year on a research

sabbatical, and she needed someone to stay in her house and take care of her cat. Gray was an inside

outside cat. He slept in the house at night, but he was free to roam during the day.

Mornings and nights, I noticed he barely touched his food bowl. At first I thought he was a picky eater,

but then I saw what was happening. He would wander to the senior

living facility behind the house, where the residents fed him table scraps. Who wouldn't prefer

chicken and dumplings over dry cat food? Gray had a good thing going.

I was only a temporary part of that system, so I let it continue.

Today's poem examines the many possibilities of giving love in a temporary world.

True Story by Camille T. Dungey.

The cat wandered between two women.

In one house, kibble and clear water, sometimes bits of roast chicken even, sometimes translucent

fish skin. That's the house that first called her its own. And for all those nights until she found the other woman, she'd purred there without asking for

anything more. But, I've already told you, she found the other woman, whose house held the wondrous calm of no children, a blessing, wet food

in the kitchen, catnip growing for her in the yard. The women came to be like sister wives, accepting, if not companionable, opening and offering everything when the cat came around.

For years, this continued. They lived next door to each other, the women,

on the wooded west slope of a mountain

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