In a quiet back way, I met a colorful alley cat. Or, I should say, I stumbled right over him. He'd been basking in the sun in plain sight, minding his own business. Yet I, in my absentmindedness, hadn't even seen him.

He was a steadfast guardian of all he held dear. An appraising look at the approach of a challenger. A dismissive smirk if he found you wanting; a quiet laugh when you measured up. If you didn't get distracted by the long eyelashes, you found he had clever eyes, the sort that could pierce you down to the depths of your soul. I daresay I made it a point not to test him too often.

There was a mother bear in the language department at my university.

When I was still a small creature, she steadied me on the back of a horse, like a solid anchor at my back, one that could never be unseated. The day I held the reins for the first time, she placed her hand over mine to help me guide our mount. If I fell off, she picked me back up, dusting me off and checking for injuries.

If my sister was a tree, then this woman was the wild wind in her branches.

At first she was a friendly face, existing in a liminal time, just outside of everyone else's clock. I'm not sure when she arrived, but it was sudden, with a splatter of toner ink on my purse and profuse apologies. (Personally, I thought it made the thing look cool and grungy.) Once she did show up, however, it was as if she had always been around, a half hour's conversation I could sometimes look forward to at the end of the day.

The steady hum of the ballgame on TV in the other room, or the distant banging of a hammer against a nail, always let me know where he was. Sometimes, on summer evenings, his song rang out over the open countryside, his fingers strumming an accompanying rhythm on his guitar strings. When I walked in the door, he greeted me with a booming hello. When I had to leave, he never said goodbye, just “see you later.” Because of course he would see me later.

He was a point of stillness in a maelstrom. To find him in a whirling, busy crowd, you had only to look for the one anchored to the earth like a steadfast pillar. When he smiled, and stretched out his hand, it was to the quiet ones, the displaced ones, the rejected ones. He helped us up and brought us into his place of peace.