Midnight Moves In

After Scarlett and Kitty left us I was not really interested in having new cats in my life, at least for a while.  For one thing, our lives changed drastically.  Our daughter was nearly grown, and I decided to go into my family business for a while.

My mother was a bail bond agent and had her own agency, plus she opened a little newsstand in the office where I worked there for a bit.  Eventually that proved not to be a great idea, so the offices reverted to bail bonds only and I took the tests from the state Insurance Commissioner and got my bail license.

Being a bail agent is a very demanding job which keeps you out of the home and occasionally on the street looking for your forgetful clients.  There was little time in my life for much else.  Things continued on this path for a good while, but our lives were about to take another couple of turns that no one saw coming.

The most significant of those changes was the birth of a beautiful baby boy into the family!  He was born 3 days before my 40th birthday and I always say he was the best birthday present ever!  Then, when the Boy was around 2 years old, my husband received a very good job promotion which included a move to Atlanta, GA from our Indianapolis home.  The move was a mixed bag.  It was great living in the South for many reasons, weather being a really big plus, but it also meant leaving all our family behind, which was a very sad side effect. 

Things went very well for us until our son started school, then I found myself  kind of lost.  He was also suffering some loneliness issues, missing family a great deal, so we decided to add a pet to our family.  One day while shopping at the mall I saw a sign on the window of the pet store, "Black Kittens, $20.00".  This store was very good about taking in litters of kittens, giving them their first shots and so on, then selling them for a small fee.  The $20.00 price tag was about half the normal price so I figured they must have quite a selection of kittens.  That plus the fact that I love black cats got me to go look, and sure enough, there was probably a dozen little kittens in the shop and about half of them black.  After spending a good deal of time holding the kittens, one by one, my son finally decided on one of a pair of twins.  He was from a litter of 4, two solid black and 2 solid blue gray.  I wanted all of them, of course, but my husband was the voice of reason.  One kitten it was.  Midnight was 7 weeks old when he came home.

I had been purchasing cat items over the past weeks, so bringing Midnight home was easy.  All I needed was food, which we were able to get at the shop, and we were set.  Off we went to the car, drove the short distance to home with Midnight gripping my son's shirt and mewing like mad all the way and both he and I trying to comfort him.  When we got home and sat him down, he went as straight as he could walk to the refrigerator and plopped down to stare at the door.  I guess that wherever he came from, the refrigerator had been a favorite place.

After a few days, Midnight was completely in charge of the household, or so he thought.

Scarlett, Chapter 5 - The Baby Invasion

The months had passed very fast and Scarlett and Miss Kitty had agreed on the division of the house humans and the sleeping arrangements after a bit of a struggle.  At first it was like having two toddlers.  Mine, mine, mine!  Everything is mine!!!  Finally things settled out with Miss Kitty spending her sleeping time on my daughter's bed and Scarlett with my husband and me.  She would get on the foot of the bed on my side at first and then creep her way up until she was sleeping in the middle between us.  She had to have one set of paws touching me and the other touching my husband.  It was great fun to let her get into a deep sleep then move a bit so that her feet no longer touched.  She would not wake up from this, but would squirm and wriggle around until she again could touch us both.  If the humans were to get to close together making it hard for her to find room, she would use the back legs and push against one or the other of us until someone moved, allowing space for her.

She had also claimed my old wooden rocking chair as hers when we were all in the living room.  There was a small pillow I kept in the seat of this chair and Scarlett would curl up on it and enjoy the company of the family or sleep.  One day the tranquility of the household was turned upside down with friends came to visit bringing with them their 18 month old child.  My daughter was the the only non adult human in the household and Scarlett was used to her and her friends, but they were in the 8 to 10 year old range.  This little one was a totally new experience for poor Scarlett and Miss Kitty.  Miss Kitty method of coping was to retreat to my daughter's bedroom but Scarlett was not going to back off.  This was her house and no small human was going to change that.  Instead of running upstairs for the safety of the bedroom,  she chose to stay planted in the living room.  She did run to the end of the sofa for a bit, watching warily as this child toddled around the room.  The baby, thankfully, had no interest in Scarlett but was entertained a great deal by pushing around my (very light weight) plastic parsons table that served as an end table in my living room at the time.  Scarlett watch this for a bit, then ran the rest of the way behind the couch where she spent the next hour or so emitting a constant low growl.  We were wondering how she could breathe with all this growling but I knew what a fight it would be to try and remove her from the room, so I just kept a close eye on things and hoped for the best.

Have you ever had one of those times when you really wished you had a video camera running?  The next few moments of this day was one of those times.

When my friends did leave Scarlett re-emerged to find that the little table had been pushed up to the front of the rocking chair seat and, to her great horror, her pillow was in the floor!  This would not do at all.  I was walking around the room, putting things back in place when I noticed Scarlett sitting in front of the rocking chair and looking at the pillow in the floor.  My husband and I decided that we wanted to see what she would.  Sure enough, she took matters into her own hands, (or, in this case, teeth) and the next thing we knew she was dragging the pillow towards the chair.  Once she got it to the base of the table, she carefully laid it on the floor and jumped to the top of the little table and reached down to pull the pillow up while she was backing into the seat of the chair.  She dropped the pillow when she had come to the back of the chair and could go no further, leaving the pillow on the table and not in the chair where it belongs.

The events up to now had amazed us.  The next thing she did totally blew us away. We figured she was done with this project and I was getting ready to help her out when she got up from the seat of the chair and went to the table, lying down in front of the pillow facing the back of the chair.  She then used her back feet to push this pillow the rest of the way into the seat of the chair!  We were dumbfounded!  How did this cat figure out how to do something like that?? 

I have known many cats over the years but I have never seen anything like the intelligence it took to figure this out in another cat.  Once the pillow was in place, Scarlett got on top of it for a well deserved nap.  My husband and I figured that she may have learned this little trick from all the times at night when she would push us out of the way.