We Have Cats!

Last week Mommy went to  the dentist, so we got left home with our Dad, which usually makes us very nervous, because he is our play parent, not our feeding parent, and the possibility that we would waste away while he endlessly threw a ball for us after Mommy didn’t come home was concerning.

Daddy opened the front door and let us sit on the porch so we could look out the door for Mom.  We bark at everyone we see because that person could be mommy in disguise. We were sure Mommy was home when an older woman, with white hair, carrying her mail, walked up to our steps. She must have been gone a long time because she had aged 20 years.

The woman never made it to the door.  Our barks warned Daddy that aged Mommy was home.  Daddy needed to unlock and open the porch door but had to put us inside first, so we didn’t attack aged Mommy.  Of course, as soon as I was touched, I attacked Pocket, because that is how I roll. Aged Mommy rolled her eyes and shook her head as Daddy wrestled us into the kitchen.  Man, aged Mommy, had grown bitchy.

We could hear from the kitchen as Daddy opened the porch door and asked if he could help aged Mommy.  “You know ya got cats?” the woman, who we knew was not Mommy, rasped in a voice that had encountered 10,000 cigarettes.  Daddy said no. “They were in my driveway then they ran under your house, get ‘em out of there,”

For a year we had been insisting that something was under our house.  We would look inside the grates and bark. Our parents had insisted it was nothing, but now we had proof! Cats!  Under our house! We’re we sleep! We’re our children come and play with their toys!

We immediately wanted Daddy to step aside and let us flush the cats, but he said he would handle it in a non-violent manner.  Freaking snowflake!

There was a gap in the slats under the house where the smaller HVAC unit was installed.  Daddy went there, looked inside and saw a cat sitting a few inches away. “I am sorry,” Daddy said “but you are going to have to leave. The Cigarette Lady is complaining about you.”   The cat tilted her head and stared at him. “Do you have any kitties in here?” he asked. Again, she did not answer. Daddy told her she had five minutes to move and take her kitties.

He waited, then went to the other side of the house, and crawled underneath.  There was stuff there from the Civil War. There were muskets, mini balls, Edsel parts, a wind-up phonograph, a VCR.  People who live here have shoved everything under their house for years. Daddy carefully crawled along the perimeter making sure there were no kitties.  A half-hour later he crawled out covered with cobwebs, dust, rat hair while looking like a guy trying to play a ghost on Scooby Doo. He then came into the house to get his secret weapon.  Me!

He took me to the place where the missing slat belonged, and for five minutes he let me sniff.  I took in deep breaths, short breaths, half breaths, and rapid breaths. There were a lot of scents under there that were fascinating.  I am pretty sure a former occupant killed his wife using formaldehyde. After 20 minutes I stepped back and gave Daddy my “all clear” grunt.

He put in a new slat cutting off the kitty entrance.  There was room under the HVAC unit for a kitty to squeeze through if it had got trapped under the house.  And if there was any meowing under the house Pocket and I would alert our parents. It has been a week, and we have been cat free.

So friends, make sure your houses are buttoned up tight, if not you are going to have cats, and you don’t want that.