Feb 09 2010

Changes

Published by at 9:45 am under Cats,Country Life,Henry

Every morning, I make coffee and then clean up the cat barf. It’s quite the glamorous life.

Maybe part of the reason Henry Etta is so tiny is that she pukes so much. Is bulimia popular among neurotic cats of a certain age?

Feeding the cats has changed quite a bit since we moved. June is still generally the most interested, and often reminds me when feeding time is as close as an hour away, but just as often lies there languidly when I put food in the dishes. June and Audrey used to only eat out of their own dishes, but now it’s a kind of free-for-all. Audrey spends so much time outside now that I rarely see her eat in the house, though I’m sure she does.

Henry has taken up the slack and is almost always the first one there, though she just nibbles a little and then retires to her cushion. Although I’m glad that she’s finally enjoying the cushy bed I bought her almost three years ago, the down side is that she doesn’t sit on my lap as much. However, she does have an uncanny ability to sit with me right before the phone rings or I have to get up for some other reason, and then I feel guilty about moving her fragile little body to deal with whatever I have to deal with.

The Sea Flex and metacam have worked wonders, and Henry Etta can run and jump better than before. But no matter what I do, her fur is always scruffy, her whiskers bent, and she is still less than five pounds.

Audrey the Adventuress has been worrying months off my rapidly diminishing life. As you know, my original plan was to keep the cats in after dinner, but my original plan failed. Plan B was to have everyone in before I went to bed, and that’s been partially successful. June is almost always in at bed time, and busy getting her 18 hours of beauty sleep (which I’m convinced is the secret to her loveliness), and Henry Etta rarely bothers with Nature, but Audrey is usually out and about, even when it’s raining, cold, and completely unappealing to Self.

Those of you who have cats in your lives will know that calling them is futile. Not that it stops me. But I hate going to bed without all the cats safely in the house. A few nights ago, Audrey went out at 8 pm and didn’t come home until 4 am, which I greeted with any parent’s enthusiasm. I was up every hour that night, calling her, and I left all the outside lights on, thinking that it would deter predators, though maybe it would just make it easier for them to see a little brown tabby at night.

The thing is, if I let her out during the night for an hour or so, I just go back to bed. So even for a neurosis, it’s completely irrational. But Megan has had one cat vanish into the woods, and Jonathan has had three over the fifteen years he’s lived here, so the odds may not be all that much in Audrey’s favor.

Still, I think my brother is probably right, and if I could sit Audrey down and explain all the risks to her, she’d still pick the uncertainty of outdoors over the certainty of indoors. And she wouldn’t have become her total Adventurous Audrey self if she’d been kept inside. I guess everything really is a trade-off.

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One response so far

One Response to “Changes”

  1. Guyon 10 Feb 2010 at 4:05 am

    Cats have always done what they want when they want, they are very independent creatures but none the less love the attention when they decide it’s time for them.