For all his self-conceit, Benjamin BadKitten knows how to be a loyal friend

I had a chat with Benjamin BadKitten last Sunday, after a friend at church told me an endearing story about her cat, Gabriella. The day before, my friend wore wool slacks and a fleece top to cut back overgrown brush on her property. When she finished, she found an entire brigade of burrs had attached themselves to the wool and fleece. She changed clothes and began the tedious task of removing the burrs by hand. Soon Gabriella jumped onto the burr-surgery table and volunteered to help. My friend worried that her cat would either shred the clothes or eat the burrs, but, instead, the loyal and intelligent Gabriella carefully used the tips of her claws to dislodge the clinging burrs from the fabric. (She might had had a less noble motive, too: One-upping the black puppy that recently joined the household.) I thought this story – minus the puppy motive – might be an inspiration to my own intelligent BadKitten, who seldom uses his powers for good around our house or garden.

“What's your point?” Benjamin flattened his ears and yawned, because I had awakened him from his post-lunch nap. My point, I said patiently, is that some cats actually think about their people's needs and feelings, instead of practically drowning in the pond of their own narcissism. My ten-year-old BadKitten stretched and lifted his chin so I could pet him. “I think about your needs and feelings. I am a very sensitive kitten. Many times a day I think that you need to feed me and freshen the water in my bowl, and you need to put my favorite fleece blanket at the foot of your bed so I can be warm when I meditate there. And I think about how you must be feeling lonely without a small, fluffy Maine coon cat to pet and praise, so I leap gracefully onto your lap.” Benjamin is decidedly fluffy, but he passed “small” several dozen depot stops ago. I have to admit he's right about leaping gracefully, though. He's still athletic, quick, and light on his paws, even if he's carrying much more of a tummy than he used to.

I sighed. Remember Lizzy? I asked. The best adult cat I've ever had was a long-haired “pure-bred, championship silver Persian,” as she preferred to think of herself. Actually, she had more than a bit of white and butterscotch fur mingling with the silver, and, unlike a true Persian cat's squashed-looking face, Lizzy had a classic profile. Smart and vocal, that cat was on my wavelength for all the years that she lived. Even though she had much of the self-centeredness for which cats are stereotyped, she could also be remarkably intuitive. On the day, many years ago, when my mail included not one but two rejection letters from New York publishers, I sat, sobbing, on the floor of my writing room. Lizzy padded up to me, climbed onto my lap, and gently patted my cheek with her paw. She stayed with me while my tears gradually stopped and I told her about all my insecurities as a writer.

You, I reminded Benjamin, never pat my cheek when I cry. You use my jeans as a climbing post – while I'm wearing them – and shinny up my leg so I'll pick you up and pet you. But then I paused and considered him, the Peter Pan of cats, who will always remain a BadKitten. When Lizzy was dying, I held her in my arms, because I couldn't bear to think of her being alone as her life ebbed away. Benjamin and Tessa the Vague kept vigil with Lizzy and me. The two cats sat close together, a few feet from where I knelt on the floor with Lizzy, silently – and, I thought, respectfully – waiting through the long night until only the spirit of my beloved cat remained. (Even Tessa, who normally seems to lack candlepower, behaved with dignity and innate animal wisdom during Lizzy's last hours.)

Now, here in Moscow, Benjamin keeps a different vigil with his best buddy, our Old English sheepdog, Rags, who lives in twilight. Our good dog, elderly, blind and frail, is always the one Benjamin greets first when he enters the living room. My husband and I don't know how many more weeks Rags will be with us. He seems to grow a little more feeble and confused each day. We are certain that Benjamin is a comforting presence to Rags. For Ben's blend of compassion and his “What? He's my buddy” naturalness, I can forgive my cat his many (many, many) transgressions. Lizzy was the queen of adult cats. But Benjamin, who would try to remove a burr only if it attached itself to his ample backside, will always be the best little BadKitten that ever there was.

Taking the path from swirling leaves and mulched gardens to cozy indoor projects

Our autumn, with its glorious colors, swirling leaves and mild weather, has been a gift from the Garden Goddess so far. We can take down our gardens during sunny afternoons, instead of having to bundle up in fleece and gloves to cut down the last of the Canterbury bells or the final heads of broccoli. (Not that I would have any personal experience with broccoli – or any other vegetable plants – producing into October. Mine wimped out in August.) This weekend I'll spread a rich composting mulch over the perennial beds, to give them an extra layer of protection from the chill that could come soon. As I also consider adding an extra blanket to the beds in our house, my thoughts and to-do lists now turn away from the flower and vegetable gardens, toward domestic plans indoors. It's time to decorate our home and front porch for autumn and put a lighted pumpkin in the window for the trick-or-treaters who ring our doorbell on Halloween night.

Next (and soon) I'll finish writing the script for this year's Christmas pageant, featuring the children and teenagers of my church and wider community. Time to schedule rehearsals and feel my smile widen every time the cast gathers, giggling, asking questions, running lines, and adding their own sparkle to the dialogue I've written to reflect each actor's special gifts. On a parallel track, I'll start my holiday lists, beginning with Thanksgiving. Last year, our two adult children took over all the cooking for our family's turkey dinner, because they wanted me to rest after very minor skin cancer surgery. Our son and daughter divided the cooking and created a marvelous meal that combined family favorites with some new recipes. This year our daughter will host again, but I'm also reclaiming my apron, because we Italian mamas have a hard time remaining seated – or staying out of the kitchen – for very long.

Autumn is a quicksilver season. Its maple and oak trees can glow with beauty one day, and a fierce wind can leave them standing, stark and bare, the next. Our menagerie is celebrating the season by bringing mementos inside for my husband and me to enjoy (or vacuum away.) Rags, our Old English sheepdog, habitually carries in clumps of dry leaves that cling to his big paws, and he often sports a small, red or gold maple leaf on his nose or dangling from a shaggy ear. All three cats, Tessa the Vague, Abigail Grump, and the one and only Benjamin BadKitten, track in bits of mulch, leaves, and, unfortunately, an occasional mouse or bird. Abigail's favorite place to observe the autumn world is in a small, compost-filled planter on our patio. She looks like a black and white hen, setting her eggs, with her paws tucked beneath her. It won't be long, I remind myself, that our furry family members will be housebound, braving the cold outdoors only for personal hygiene. And I will smile at them as I sit in my favorite chair, with my book on my lap and a mug of hot tea beside me.

While my memory's fresh, I'll make my do-and-don't lists for 2016 vegetable and flower gardens

I might have exaggerated a wee bit in a recent blog post, when I wrote that I had ordered and received six billion tulip and daffodil bulbs. The actual total was closer to six hundred – nearly all of which I planted during a three-day weekend, in 16 hours of gardening. My husband put in nearly as many hours, rototilling the new bulb gardens, mixing compost into our raised vegetable beds, and planting two shrubs in the backyard. (I know: we are the poster couple for romantic weekend getaways – to the compost pile, garden shed and the Church of Dirt and Flowers.) As I inched along the planting beds on my creaking knees, mentally designing color combinations for grouping the bulbs, my mantra was Think Springtime. I pictured the new tulips and daffodils joining their veteran bulb buddies to create blooming waves of red, purple, orange, yellow, pink, and white petals bordering the perennial beds in our front yard. [Note: I have ordered tulip, daffodil and other spring-flowering bulbs from VanBourgondien (dutchbulbs.com) and Breck's (brecks.com) for years, and appreciate the fat, healthy bulbs I receive at planting time.]

Now most of our flower beds are ready for autumn blankets of compost – except for the sunflower garden outside my office window. As I write, finches and chickadees are hanging upside-down from the tall stalks, harvesting the last of the seeds from flower heads nearly bald from the little birds' unrelenting appetites. I love this unexpected bonus of garden joy so much that, next spring, I'll move the tomato bed elsewhere and plant only sunflowers (for the birds) and hollyhocks (for the bees) below my window.

During my recent bulb-planting-palooza, I had company in the garden. Abigail, our chickadee-sushi-loving cat, and chief staffer Tessa the Vague, our calico – whose already limited battery power grows dimmer every day – each took a turn as my supervisor. Abby complained that the noise from Lee's rototiller in the side yard was giving her a migraine (and scaring off her luncheon plans.) Tessa wandered about, startling at every oak leaf that crunched under her paws, until she finally settled in the middle of the narrow bed I was planting. I didn't disturb her, because her safe touchdown in an actual garden site is a rare event. She napped for awhile, and then rolled around awkwardly in the newly composted patch before beginning her long, complex trek to find the cat door. Meanwhile, Benjamin BadKitten, the deposed chief, did not set even one fat paw in the garden with me all weekend. He was too busy doing research, he explained with a snooty lift of his nose. Halloween is coming, and he was calculating the algorithm required to stuff my chief garden staffer into a pumpkin.

We impetuous gardeners cannot count on memory alone to remember our plans for next year's plantings. In my decades of gardening, I wonder how many fabulously brilliant ideas I lost between the blue and gold of October's skies and the pink and green of May's gardens. No matter how certain I was that I would remember exactly the changes I'd make, some of those bright thought-bubbles floated away before I'd even filled the Christmas stockings. Many of my family members and friends rely on their smart phones for keeping schedules and lists. I, the geezer who still has an aol.com email address (it's so ancient, it's now retro-hip,) use a paper-and-pen weekly planner. Every week during take-down-the-garden month, usually October, I note which varieties of seeds tanked and which triumphed. (Guess which column has the most entries.) I always buy next year's planner early, so I have it in autumn, and I can make my to-do lists on the calendar pages for next April, May and June.

On my 2016 list, I'll write these three items in big letters at the top:

• Don't cave to cheap thrills and set more than one zucchini plant in the raised bed. Remember you're the only one who will eat the Zs, and that you don't eat much sweet stuff like zucchini bread. Remember the nightly dinners of baked, roasted and sauteed zukes, egged, floured and herbed, in hopes of revving up their blandness? Remember that the blandness never really disappeared?
• Plant the tomatoes in big, individual pots and set them on the sunny, south-facing patio. A few years ago, they grew well in their patio pots and tasted sweet and juicy. (We would have enjoyed many more tomatoes that summer, but our late, beloved golden retriever, Kaylee, stole them off the vines, even after we wrapped the plants in plastic netting. That dog loved her 'matoes.)
• Do not plant any more bulbs. At all. Anywhere. Do not gaze out onto the backyard shrubbery beds and imagine how well the taller shrubs would set off flowering clusters of tulips, daffodils and grape hyacinths along the length of the fence. Imagine, instead, how much hard labor those beds would need to become bulb-ready. There's bad dirt out there, and it would need digging, amending, fertilizing, rototilling, and more digging before you could sink to your aching knees (which will be a full year older and creakier) and start planting six billion more bulbs. But...can't you just see those gorgeous parrot tulips,pink and yellow angeliques, deep red couleur cardinals, the giant trumpet daffodils…?Stop that right now. Smack yourself on the forehead. Do not plant any more bulbs. Anywhere. At all.

What will be on your own “do or don't” lists for next year's garden?

I knew I was living up to my impetuous reputation the day the tulip bulbs arrived

I've been breaking in a new pair of walking shoes this week – red suede. I'd thought about buying blue suede shoes, but then I should be walkin' in Memphis, instead of in Moscow. I came home one morning from a brisk turn around our neighborhood in time to see the letter carrier delivering a box to our front porch. If I needed a reminder that The Impetuous Gardener is an accurate name for my column, that box was all the evidence required. I felt the first twinge of alarm at the size of the carton and its many air holes. But, I assured myself, tulip and daffodil bulbs take up space, and there's probably a lot of packing material inside to protect them from damage during shipping. I stooped to pick up the box, couldn't lift it even an inch off the ground, and felt the little twinge morph fast into full-blown panic.

 

I bet that carton weighed more than Rags, my Old English sheepdog, and the pudgy Benjamin BadKitten combined. How many tulips and daffodils had I ordered? Did my husband and I commandeer --and plow – part of the neighbors' yard, to compete with the West Side tulip fields in northern Washington state? My immediate worry was how to lug that monster bulb box from the front porch all the way to the patio at the back of the house. (Pride and embarrassment stopped me from waiting until my husband came home to act as tulip transporter.)

I am a small person but possess a great deal of determination. After propping open the front and patio doors, I gulped extra air, flexed nonexistent muscles, and hefted that box as far as my hip. After huffing out a couple of brief, colorful phrases, I staggered through the living and dining rooms to the patio door. The Garden Goddess must have protected me from taking a header down the two steps from the dining room to the patio, because I certainly couldn't see around the carton to check my footing. I plunked the box onto the patio table and then opened it, to find every square inch stuffed with mesh bags of bulbs. I had ordered approximately six billion tulips in jewel and pastel colors, a “super sack” of naturalizing daffodils, and blue, purple and yellow crocuses to celebrate the arrival of spring.

Our gardens already include bulb beds, which I started digging when we moved to Moscow five years ago. This summer I added a flower bed in our front yard and imagined its winding paths framed with tulips and daffodils next April and May. I love creating beauty, in our home and in our yard. If seeing bright-petaled flowers brings passersby as much joy as the sight brings me, my own happiness multiplies. During the gardening months, I include a budget item for buying plants and bulbs – and got a great deal on the tulips and daffs I ordered. Now I have to imagine where the heck to plant the 12 billion bulbs in that box. I see many hours of spading soil in my immediate future, and my husband has offered to spend much of this weekend with our rototiller.

 

While I'm digging, I'm not sure I can count on my garden staffer to keep me company. Unfortunately, Tessa the Vague needs a bit more orientation: If she wants to go out to the patio, she waits for me to open the dining room door. (She also knows how to use the cat door, a major milestone, but that leads to the front yard.) Recently, when Tessa and I were in the laundry room, I opened its door, which also leads to the patio, and waited for Tessa to go outside. She paused at the threshold, studied the patio, and looked up at me with total confusion in her wide, vacant green eyes. From the door, she could see all the familiar landmarks on the patio, but the perspective was different. My chief garden executive believed I was trying to send her to Mars, and skittered away.

My three cats are trying to scare me with their low-budget scary movie – and it's not even Halloween

 I'm not going to write about autumn garden chores today, because here is an even more pressing issue to deal with: The cat-tailed members of our household seem to be trying to send me straight into Cloud Cuckooland. The three conspirators include my current chief garden staffer, Tessa the Vague, a 14-year-old calico; Abigail, a black and white longhair, and – this will come as a shock – Benjamin BadKitten, my former garden chief. Abigail is as old as Tessa but still has all her own mental marbles, plus most of the aggies, glassies and swirlies that Tessa has lacked from birth. Benjamin is a black and brown Maine coon cat with a cunning mind and a penchant for trouble, who had been shunning Tessa since I demoted him.

With Tessa's rise to glory, Abigail, never a social cat, abandoned her favorite napping spot in the front yard, under the phlox, and avoided Tessa in the house, too. So I was delighted – at first –when I saw all three cats huddled together near the bird bath in the flower garden on a recent sunny day. With their paws tucked under them, they looked like three furry loaves of bread, pumpernickel, sourdough, and ham on rye (guess who's who.) I assumed that Benjamin and Abigail were trying to bring Tessa up to speed on basic garden orientation. (Up to speed for Tess means, “See that tall green thing with the petals on top? That's a clue. If you see some of those things around, you've probably found the flower garden, unless you took a wrong turn and ended up on Main Street, in front of a flower shop.”

After the bonding session in the garden, I expected peace among the cat tails. The next morning, I was working at my computer when I heard an unnerving crunching sound coming from under the bed. My stomach tightened as I crouched and found Abigail finishing a truly macabre brunch of feathered chickadee sushi. Abigail has never been a bird catcher. The last time she showed a hunter's instinct was a year ago, when she and her partner in crime, the BadKitten, ushered a live mouse into our home, via the cat door, and then lost the little critter. The mouse, who was faster and smarter than those two feline doofuses, roamed free overnight, until I found him the next morning in my closet, experiencing rigor mortis.

Now, after the chickadee sushi scene, Tessa has begun a new ritual of perching on the arm of my chair while I read or watch TV. She stares at me with unblinking, jade green eyes as blank as the marbles she does not possess. When I pet her, she purrs quietly and then makes an awkward trip from the chair arm onto my lap – where she sits, staring at me. She does not relax or purr again. She just stares. Maybe the pressure of her new responsibilities – finding the garden and keeping me company while I work – has pushed her to a Tessa version of catatonia, but she's not saying. She just sits on my lap and stares. I am feeling stalked.

After Abby and Tess creeped me out, each in her own special way, I actually told Benjamin that he had become The Good One, at least temporarily. My large BadKitten leaped athletically from the floor onto my lap, seeming to mock Tessa with his agility, and settled in, purring loudly and smugly. Benjamin didn't stare at me; he just arranged his considerable avoir dupois and shut his eyes. He was still sporting his halo late that evening, when I was reading alone in the living room and suddenly heard an odd clanking sound coming from the kitchen. When the sound repeated, I went to check – just in time to find Benjamin carrying a mouse trap,from which dangled a skinny gray tail, with the rest of the murdered little rodent attached. I shrieked for my husband, who has danced the mousetrap polka with Benjamin before He quickly disposed of that beastly cat's unfortunate trophy.

This is the fourth time my BadKitten has come home bearing identical gifts: a mousetrap plus a dead mouse. Each time he had the nerve to think we'd believe – what? That he bought a trap, baited it, and then lured a mouse into it? (Note to neighbors: Your mouse traps work well, but our cat steals them – and the mice they attract --from your yard. I am more sorry about this than you can imagine.)

So one cat's dormant hunter instincts have suddenly awakened, and another cat's dormant mind will never wake up, but she has developed a stalking fetish. The third cat appears periodically with dead, pre-trapped mice. And, as a denouement, after each act of bone crunching, lap stalking, or mousetrap retrieval, each cat gets sick. The BadKitten, I suspect, has directed every scene of this low-budget scary movie to drive me bananas enough to return him to power. Maybe I should just get a gerbil.