But every morning, dark or light, cold or warm, I’m now up at 5:30 am… rousting Oscar as I go off for my 1/2 hour drive to Schenectady, where I work as a graphic designer. After over a decade in a brightly sunlit, plant rich environment with rainbow making prisms in the sunny windows where I can make my own hours and life, I spend my days in a small, gray, dark cubicle.  Some days, the sun is down when I get back home. It has not been easy – regular paycheck aside – but by far the hardest part has been leaving my little pussycat behind me every day.

So, to make the transition easier, I dug through a series of photos I’d taken back when Oscar was featured as a “home office cat” in well known home business magazine article, and created an 11×17 photo poster that I could hang behind my computer monitor in the cubicle. It will never take the place of having the big puffalump snoozing in my lap while I work all day, but it will remind me why I work hard all day to bring home the catnip.

My friend owned her first Jack Russell Terrier since he was a puppy, and I’ve known him most of his life. I took this photograph with my digital phone because I thought his sleeping pose was hilarious.

When I looked at it, my minds eye turned it upside down, and saw a photo art opportunity. I used the image as the basis of a little present for her – Jack the Angel. She loved it when I sent it to her by email later that week.

What we didn’t know then is that Jack had cancer.  She found out a few months later. Devastated, she asked me to go on a little adventure with them one day while she took him for a special trip to the park. I was to take as many photos and videos as I could, so she’d have something to remember him with. It was a late summer day, with beautiful blue skies and a breeze. As sad as the day was, knowing he’d soon be gone, it was also one of the loveliest.

The following Christmas, I created a memorial poster for her, as a gift. I took the best photos of her Jack, and arranged them in an 18″x24″ design, with his name, and had it printed on heavy photographic paper. She can frame it however she wants, and keep him nearby. And she’ll always have Jack the Angel to look over her.

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