Beech Tree News Network

I went to visit Garey’s mom, Aggie, for a few days last week.  She gets so lonely since her little dog passed away.  Before I left, I gave Garey strict instructions to make sure our two kittens continued to live in the manner to which they had grown accustomed, then I loaded my stuff and headed to Corner, Alabama.

               I like to visit Aggie by myself.  When Garey and his sister, Charlotte, are thrown into the mix, there is too much fussing and arguing for my taste—not with each other, rather with their mom.  Charlotte is the one who sees after Aggie most of the time.  She takes Aggie to the doctor and picks up her medicine and groceries.  Charlotte also does Aggie’s laundry and mows her yard, as well.  Garey has only been able to help on occasional weekends, but now that he is retired, he will be able to be there more often. 

               Aggie and I love to play Rummikub, and when I visit, we have marathons.  We eat mostly sandwiches and some sort of pastry then play the game for hours at a time.  We are usually pretty evenly matched, each of us losing by only a tile or two.  On this visit, however, Aggie was on top of her game.   She won most of the time.  I told her it was fortunate for me that she could only see out of one eye, or I wouldn’t stand a chance.  She loved that.

               While I was there, I did her laundry.  Charlotte came up the night before and unlocked the washroom.  The room is just outside the basement, and they don’t want Aggie going up and down the basement stairs, because they are afraid that she will fall.  As a second layer of protection, they keep the washroom locked.  Charlotte and Garey won’t tell me where the key is hidden, because they fear that Aggie will wrangle the information out of me. After I finished with the laundry, I locked the washroom per Charlotte’s instructions, and I told Aggie I had to do so, or Charlotte wouldn’t let me come back down to play with her.

               When I got back home to Kentucky, I noticed the landscape of my kitchen had changed.  There was a two-strand electric fence running the length of my counter, as well as a large fish net—the scoop kind—hanging from the hall door leading into my kitchen. 

               “What’s up with all this?” I asked Garey.

               “I haven’t been able to keep Brother and Sister off the counter since you left,” he said, “so I found my old fencer and set it up in here.”

               “Garey! You could have really hurt the little things!” I fussed.

               “That old thing barely works,” he said, “Nobody is going to get hurt.”

               I pointed to the net hanging on the hall door, a question in my eyes.

               “You know how hard it is to keep them from darting into a room every time you open a door, especially the bedroom, so I take the net with me and hold it down at my feet,” he explained.  “If they try to dart in, I scoop em up with the net.”

               Garey had obviously not taken my instructions to make sure the kittens continued to live in the manner to which they had grown accustomed seriously.  The next time I go to Aggie’s for a play date, the kittens are going with me.