I love my cats, and yet today and other days I hate them, too.
As I’ve mentioned before, my husband I have have four cats. We moved into this house with three, which was a blended cat family of the one he had and the two I had when we met. Since then, his cat had to be put to sleep, but we inherited one more after the deaths of each of our mothers. That leaves us with four filthy little beasts inhabiting and befouling our living space.
Because I grew up in a farm environment, I never really understood what an indoor cat could be like. Our cats were all barn cats and were only allowed in the house for short periods of time. As soon as I moved out on my own, I got an adorable black, male kitten. He was no trouble at all – so little at first that he could stand in the palm of my hand. After a while, he seemed lonely, though, so I got a little female, tabby kitten. Her mother had been an alley cat, so maybe that was the problem, but she had a difficult time grasping that it was not okay to pee on everything in my apartment. My cool, Jetsons-like midcentury sofa? She peed down each buttonhole on the cushion until the whole couch was irretrievably ruined.
I’ll skip the damage they (come to think of it, probably she) wrought upon various other apartments and condos and move ahead to our current house. From the moment we moved in, we embarked on a de-carpeting plan that is nearly complete. We are lucky enough to have hardwood floors throughout most of the house, so every carpet and pad went out the door, mainly to discourage the cats from peeing in the corners.
Even though I knew how the cats were about carpeting, I still foolishly put an area rug in my dressing room. The room is a small bedroom space that I’ve made over into a walk-in closet, and I thought it would be nice to have a rug to stand on as I dressed. BIG mistake! I’d been noticing lately that the offwhite rug was getting more and more stained-looking. Today I figured I’d go ahead and throw it out since it’s trash day anyway. Rolling up and removing the rug led me to formulate Jane’s First Law of Cat Misbehavior: “If you’ve caught a cat doing something bad once, she’s probably been doing it secretly her whole life.”
So there we are. Four aging, deliberately-incontinent cats vs. two humans struggling desperately to keep their house from smelling like the big cat exhibit at the zoo. No wonder the cats are always so snuggly and purr-y. It’s the only thing that balances out the funk they produce on a daily basis.
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