Beech Tree News Network

Brother and Sister cats took one of Garey’s hearing aids.  He keeps them on his dresser in our bedroom.  The impressive feat wasn’t that they jumped up onto his dresser.  The impressive feat was that they landed, and after doing so, located and retrieved the hearing aid.

               The dresser is Garey’s domain.  It is where his stuff collects.  When he cleans out his pockets, that stuff goes there.  Papers—lots of those—reside on his dresser, as well as things that go to his shop later, because he doesn’t have time to take them there now.  When the pile becomes mountainous, Garey sorts it.  It was mountainous on a Tuesday, the day Brother and Sister cats took one of his hearing aids.

               Garey realized what had happened the moment he opened the bedroom door and saw the lone battery and small wire lying on the floor.  We don’t normally let the cats into our room, but sometimes the little rascals fly under the radar.  Garey searched for the hearing aid in all the cat-favored places—under the bed, in the closet, beneath the wool blanket that lies on top of the covers on his side of the bed.  It was all to no avail. 

               “Oh well,” he said, “I get new hearing aids on Thursday when I go to the VA.  I can make it until then.”

               A couple of weeks ago, when we visited Nikki and Thomas in Louisiana, our friend Angie, came by each day to make sure our cats had fresh food and water.  We have kept them as strictly house cats until they are spayed and neutered.

               I’ve told you before what a struggle it is to keep the cats off the tables and the kitchen counter.  When I’m home, I use a spray bottle of water.  When I’m gone, they have a field day.

               Upon our return, we found the dining room curtains lying in the kitchen floor.  A can of WD-40 that stays on top of a storage cabinet that is about five feet tall was rolling around on the living room floor, and the buffalo that sits on the windowsill in the kitchen had a new home on the sofa.  I keep the small buffalo on that windowsill, because the window is located adjacent to the counter.  I do so in order to tell when the cats have been on the counter.  They love that buffalo, and they always take him when they’re up there.

               This particular time, the buffalo litmus test would not have been necessary, because there were a thousand little paw prints on the counter, the stove and on top of my stainless-steel toaster.  Our house looked like we had abandoned it to toddlers on Pogo Sticks.

               Do you know what we did as we surveyed the damage?  We shook our heads and we laughed.

               I thought about that later, about how we had laughed at Brother’s and Sister’s shenanigans.  Years ago, when my children were young, when I was a young mother, stressed and worried and fearful, I would have lost my mind had I returned to a scene like that.  I would have felt the burden of setting things aright.  I would have banished the little hooligans outdoors and told them to fend for themselves, then I would have spent the next two hours scrubbing everything down in Clorox bleach.

               What changed…besides me growing older, I mean?  I think it’s that I can see the big picture now.  I can see the happy in the mess.  I can see the motive in the actions.  I know that I can replace what is broken, and even if I can’t, I can see they are just things.

               At this very moment, my kitchen is a disaster.  It is a disaster, because I cooked Easter dinner, and my granddaughter helped make the coconut pie for dessert.  I could feel my daughter watching us as I told Sabria to stir the hot custard into the eggs rather than adding the eggs to the hot custard, because doing so would fry the eggs.  When we finished, my daughter put her arms around my granddaughter and said, “You have to learn everything from your grandmother, because your mother is too stressed and fearful to have time to teach you.”

               “You’re a good mother,” Sabria told her mom.

               Natalie is a good mother.  She’s just young and has the burdens of the young.

               The big picture comes further down the road.  After your children’s health scares, after the scraping and saving for their college, after the anxious nights when they are out with friends.  The big picture comes on little cat’s feet, leaving paw prints on your stainless-steel toaster and stealing the buffalo from your windowsill.

               (I found Garey’s hearing aid one week later.  It was stuffed down beside the cushion in the chair in my BBC room.)