I admit to being a crazy cat lady. There are six cats in our household and my parents have one, making our total seven. Currently, we have only one dog, Max; he's outnumbered. Our six are in pairs: Miss Chloe & Miss Clover (sisters), Mr. Rhett & Miss Scarlett (brother & sister), and Lady Willow & Sir Nicholas (brother & sister). Then there is the Maggot...or Magnolia Blossom (Maggie for short). She owns the parental units.
Mr. Rhett (above) has used up at least two of his nine lives. The current look on his face is similar to what he had one Christmas after an altercation with an Old Navy bag.
The setting is Mississippi in a two story English Tudor house. The Maggot is visiting with her charges (my parents) and as usual is hiding in her sleep bowl in the bedroom downstairs just across from the stairway. Upstairs in the loft there sits an empty and open Old Navy shopping bag, heavy paper with twine handles, lime green and menopausal blue in color. The humans are downstairs in the den, in full view of the stairway and the upper walkway by the loft. The rest of the cats were meandering around in the upstairs room. It is quiet, the fire is crackling, all is well with the world.
Mr. Rhett loves paper bags. He decides to check this one out. He hops in. This is fine but the rustling draws the attention of the rest of the felines in the vicinity. They all run over to see who is in the bag. One paws at the outside and Rhett paws back. He is easily freaked out and decides to vacate the bag. This is where life gets interesting. Jumping out of the bag he misjudges where he is and ends up with his head and front legs through the twine handle, stuck. This activity leads to more excitement in the watching group, more pawing and Rhett just cannot handle it. He bolts running the length of the upstairs attached to a lime green and blue Old Navy bag, only his paws visible to the others. They make chase.
Rhett feels cornered in the back room and gallops back down the hall, down the stairs and into the master bedroom where Maggie is sleeping peacefully, with a line of cats running behind. If you know how a small animal between 10 - 15 pounds can sound like a herd of elephants when he runs, you can imagine how six of them sound.
Rhett runs up and stops directly in front of the sleeping Maggie, she wakes, sees six wide-eyed felines up close and personal, lets out a high pitched yowlllll and takes off running out of the master bedroom with Rhett (or more precisely the blurred lime and blue bag) right behind and the wild five behind him. She runs straight to the kitchen, the others follow Rhett back up the stairs, down the hall to the back bedroom.
By this time, the humans are rolling hysterically, wishing they had a video camera so they could make $100,000 on Americas Funniest Videos. There is much hissing, spitting, growling, yowling and other commotion going on upstairs. Enough is enough. I sent Nyssa to get Rhett. He is still stuck, we cannot get him out, he is hyperventilating, his eyes are big and he has now attached himself to Nyssa's chest with the bag as an accessory. I had to cut the twine handle to get him out.
He was scared. He made himself as small and flat as possible. I took him down to the den and sat with him. His eyes never left the stairway. After a half an hour he finally got off the ottoman, slithering down the side and across the floor like a snake. Always with his eyes on the upstairs loft like he was trying to see what was hiding there waiting for him in the dark. Another bag? A demon? It took him a week to recover but I don't think he ever trusted the shadows in the loft again.
To see other pictures of cats and dogs and squirrels....Oh! No!.... be sure to visit Friday's Ark, a posting of Friday Animal Blogging. And be sure to stop by Carnival of the Animals this Sunday evening, hosted this week by Watermark.
No comments:
Post a Comment