Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC) once said “if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” I disagree. I do have a garden that I tend with parental care and take pleasure in on a daily basis. I also have a library that is as necessary to me as air, and like air, it fills all the available space. Both are part of “everything I need”—but not all.

I also need an animal—a fact I learned about myself at six when Tuffy, a terrier mix, followed my brother home from school. During the ten years he lived with us, he taught me that there were creatures on Earth besides my human parents upon whom I could rely to love me unconditionally. After Tuffy came a parade of dogs and cats, each of whom filled, to one extent or another, the void that exists in all of us—the need for reciprocal love.

When we lived in Chicago, Fred and I adopted Beau, a poodle/fox terrier mix who lived (and sailed) with us for thirteen years. Since moving to Savannah, we have offered our home to a succession of rescue cats—Hobie, Bête Noire, Harlequin, Tomochichi, Willow, Calliope, Pie, and Sam—and we have loved them all. Then last August we became petless, a whole new experience.

“Now we can travel,” we said to each other. “Now the house will be fur-free. No more trips to the vet; no more shelf space sacrificed to cat food, cat meds, and cat treats. And won’t it be wonderful to have our whole bed to ourselves?”

As it turned out, not so much.

We couldn’t break the habit of glancing down to avoid stepping on a tail. We missed the warmth of a furry, purring bundle in our lap. We reminisced about Callie’s odd sleeping preferences—an open drawer, a flower pot, a shoe box. We got misty-eyed remembering how Sam raised Pie, the five-week-old kitten he brought home  over our high board fence. The house seemed empty with only our own four feet instead of eight or twelve or even sixteen. We discovered that the freedom of not having an animal was way overrated.

Enter, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Now, instead of ridding the couch of Sam’s orange hair we’re vacuuming up Lucy’s black fuzz. Instead of regaining a foot of kitchen shelf space, we have given over much of the laundry room to food-and-water bowls, bags of kibbles, dog treats, harnesses and leashes, a cold-weather dog jacket, and a collection of plastic pick-up bags. The small, single ball with a bell has been exchanged for a growing collection of stuffed animals and chew toys. The basket that two cats once shared has now been claimed by one smallish, rescue Shih/Poo who digs holes in my garden and piles up our socks in the middle of the living room floor.

Lucy makes us laugh at her antics, distracts us from TV and computer, gets us outside and moving, and reminds us with her own joi de vivre that life is wonderful and fleeting and that we are very, very lucky to be sharing it with her.

Now I have everything I need.

Here in Savannah,Georgia, people in my neighborhood are accustomed to a variety of aromas—the occasional stench of the paper mill when the wind is from the northwest; the sweet, grassy fragrance of the salt marsh to the east; the perfume of magnolia and wisteria in the spring; the lingering essence of horse and buggy.  On this warm  afternoon a new scent—wood smoke—rides in on the southern breeze.

My mind spins back to childhood autumns in the Midwest when my brothers and I raked leaves into piles and took turns igniting them under our father’s watchful eye.  I am reminded of campfires on the beach with roasted marshmallows and someone’s guitar accompanying us as we sang “My Gal Sal” and “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” I remember the scent of our neighbor farmers burning off their fields to clear them of old stalks in readiness for planting.

But these pleasant images quickly dissipate when I realize that today’s smoke comes from a forest fire in Florida, and I picture firefighters risking their lives to battle eighty-foot flames. Rabbits and foxes fleeing side by side in terror. Old pine forests sacrificed to the combined whimsy of wind and lightning.

On the six o’clock news a weeping woman hugs a blackened sauce pan amid the rubble that was once her home. “All my lovely things,” she says.  “My piano, my new loveseat, my dishes.  Gone.”

Dishes?  Loveseat?

“If we suddenly had to evacuate,” I ask my husband, “what would you grab?”

“This is a trick question, right?”

“No trick.  Assuming the dog is okay, what would you take?”

“Guns,” he says immediately. “Cameras.  Credit cards.  And the strong box with our insurance policies.” Fred plays these “what if” games as a small concession to me.  But he isn’t engaged enough to ask me the same question, doesn’t really care what I think. I tell him anyway.

“I’d take the second drawer from the little chest in the powder room. You know, the one with the family photographs.”  I recognize the look. It says There’s a chest of drawers in the powder room?  “And my eight gig flash drive with back-ups of all my manuscripts.”

For the thousandth time I am reminded that we are opposites, that we share little common ground when it comes to what is “valuable.”  For Fred that word is defined by convenience and economy.  What a nuisance to have to replace the .357 magnum and the snub-nose .38.

For me “valuable” means unique and irreplaceable.  My journals, for example, and my great grandmother’s handmade quilt.  Oh, and the box of poems and letters Fred wrote to me when we were just beginning to be us.  These treasures ground me.  Without them I’d be adrift, disconnected, rooted in air.

Sometimes our dissimilarities loom large, requiring nimble footwork to hop-scotch past the obstacles they create, such as last week when we took separate paths to meet friends for dinner and converged at their front door—he wearing jeans and I in a new silk dress.  But even during these awkward moments, I’m glad our differences exist.  Because of them I know we’ll be okay when hurricane Zelda forces us to head for the hills.

With what Fred packs we’ll be housed, fed, defended, and insured—while my carton of valuables will keep us connected to our hearts.

[First published on Women's Voices for Change: http://womensvoicesforchange.org]

Because I am the family bookkeeper, I did what I always do at mid-month—downloaded an interim bank statement to be sure my records in Quicken were in sync with those of Wells Fargo. They weren’t. According to the statement, on December 21, I had charged $697.47 to my Visa card.

No way, Jose.

The vender’s name and 800 phone number were listed next to the charge, so I made the call. A nice man named “Junior” checked his sales records and verified what I feared: Two expensive faucets had been charged to my card and shipped to my address (!) by a man I do not know named Keith Ellsworth. Junior gave me Mr. Ellsworth’s email address as well as his own extension in case I wished to contact him again.

What to do?

I plugged Mr. Ellsworth’s email address into Intelius and hit search. No such email address could be located. This scammer was good.

I took a printout of my bank statement and what little relevant information I had to an officer at my bank. He rolled his eyes at my story.

“It’s getting worse and worse, this problem,” he said. “In London it’s against the law for restaurants to carry a customer’s credit card away. Instead, the machine must be brought to the table and the card swiped in plain sight of the customer.” He added, “Some American credit card companies are now issuing cards with a built-in security code that changes after each swipe.” Unfortunately, not Wells Fargo.

We spent a half hour on the phone cancelling my card and initiating a fraud claim. No, my card had not been stolen. No, nobody uses the card except me. Yes, if necessary I’ll prosecute.

I was informed that in two or three days, $697.47 will be returned to my account provisionally, pending the outcome of the claim. I asked from whose pocket it would come.

“Ours,” said my banker, handing me a temporary card to use until my new one arrives. “Since we guarantee the safety of your money, we eat the loss. It’s one of our biggest costs of doing business.”

I wanted to ask so why don’t you issue the cards with the single-use security code? But just then my iPhone informed me my meter was about to expire. On top of everything else, a parking ticket I didn’t need.

At the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, I had an instructor who, when exasperated, would rip the charcoal from my hand and with quick, bold strokes reduce my rendering to scribble. “Space is everything,” he would shout. “Never forget that you are drawing on both sides of the line!” He meant, of course, that  just as a figure is defined and shaped by its peripheral line, so is the space where the figure is not. In other words, what isn’t there is as important to the whole as what is.

While his pedagogical methods may have rattled my confidence, they also alerted me to the concept of Null–a theory I constantly confirm by looking above, beside, and beyond what is obviously there.

The British do it well. Observing our boat’s heavy mooring rope frayed to a thread, a friend from London once commented, “I say, old dear, your stern line is not what it once was!”

Every navigator recognizes “the null” as the exact position at which no radio signal is received. Every employee understands it is the work he does not do that gets the boss’ attention. Every bird watcher appreciates the lack of fabric that makes for a three-star bikini.

As artist Andrew Wyeth once explained, “It’s not what you put in but what you leave out that counts.” How cacophonous “The Emperor Concerto” would be had Beethoven not included rests–the places without music. “Less is more” shaped the poetry of Robert Browning and later the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Centuries after Shakespeare crafted Much Ado About Nothing by selectively omitting certain words, Robert Frost recognized that “The Road Not Taken” had made all the difference. Isn’t Michelangelo’s David simply what was left over once the rest of the marble was chiseled away? What is a moon crater but a place where something is not–an eclipse but an absence of light?

And what does the Null Theory have to do with me? Where I do not go determines where I am; what I opt not to eat shapes my body. Absense, I find, is the key to being a good mother-in-law, and in my own marriage, it is often what remains unsaid that keeps the peace.

As for writer’s block–it’s nothing more than the Null Theory gone amok.  The lack of an acceptance from a publisher for my latest novel, the dearth of ideas for a new short story, the blank screen in front of me all seem to verify the yawning void of my talent. At such times drawing on both sides of the line seems like a matter of life or death.