My favorite furball's voting No on remodeling project

March 12, 2016

Our remodeling project has started, and crews are scheduled here for at least the next month. Most members of our household have adjusted fairly quickly to the occasional clamor of pounding, sawing, and sanding drifting upstairs, as a bathroom gets gutted and refitted. My husband, Lee, is finishing the painting on our main bathroom, and I've finished packing most of the kitchen, which will get a small face-lift after the bathroom is done. Last month I filled our freezer with homemade dinners, knowing that our kitchen soon will be off-limits. The stove (which won't be operable), refrigerator and microwave will move temporarily into the dining room, and I'll set up a camp kitchen for Lee and me in there.

I don't actually know what a camp kitchen looks like. In all my many decades, I've gone camping and slept in a tent only once, when I was a teenager. During that unforgettable weekend, a spider visited my sleeping bag and bit me on the face. I learned then that spider bites can make your face swell, redden and hurt. On our last day at the lake, my friend tried to tow her parents' motor boat out of the water and ended up drowning her family's station wagon. All five of us teenage girls were in the station wagon as it started to sink. I helped pull my terrified friend, who could not swim, out the backseat window and towed her to shore.

Good times – so good and so deeply memorable that I have never gone camping again. But I'm fine with making do in our dining room, heating thawed, homemade dinners, making fresh salads (the fridge will be plugged in,) and doing dishes in the bathtub. I am a hardy woman of Idaho now, after all. As long as I can microwave water for hot tea, I will smile and carry on.

One family member, however, already is feeling the stress, and has let us know that this remodeling project has severely disrupted his life and his political future. As soon as Benjamin BadKitten, our black and brown Maine coon cat, heard the first whine of a power saw, he squashed himself under an armchair in the living room. He emerged hours later, long after the crew had left for the day, looking wild-eyed and flat-eared.

I picked him up and let him settle onto my lap, from where he informed me that his campaign for president of the United States has reached a critical point. To me, that point needs to sharpen and poke my BadKitten gently in the butt, so he will decide to shed his latest delusion, along with his excess winter fur. Benjamin has already received seven promises of write-in votes, to try to head off Him Who Must not Be Named from taking his party's nomination. If that cat gains more supporters, we're going to have to file financial disclosure documents and print up some yard signs.

The next day, I closed off the kitchen from the rest of the house while a crew member measured the counter tops. After I cut off the kitchen access, I saw Benjamin flattening himself under a table in the living room . (He said he was doing his yoga stretches.) A few minutes later, I heard very loud cheeping noises and hurried back into the living room to find out the source of the sound. My BadKitten was crouched in front of a narrow space between a wall and a bookshelf. His fat tail was flicking fast.

 

A small chickadee, cornered and still chirping, struggled to squeeze behind the bookshelf. I scooped up Benjamin and shut him into my study, then carefully set the little bird into my hand and carried it outdoors. I have no idea how Benjamin brought a live bird into the house when his only open entrance – the cat door in the kitchen – was blocked off. And my cat wasn't offering any explanations. The most I could get out of him was a sly, feline smile. With smoke-and-mirrors skills like that, he might fit into the political scene all too well.

Unless my favorite furball can persuade me to start canvassing the neighborhood for him, I plan to spend some time in my garden this coming week, planting early spring vegetable and flower seeds and clearing the remaining fallen leaves from the flower beds. I've been checking the gardens daily, looking for new plant growth and whispering thanks to the Garden Goddess for protecting the tender perennials through the winter. Crocus, the garden's own Easter eggs, already are blooming purple, white and yellow. Tulip and daffodil bulbs are showing more of their green leaves every day, happy in the chilly sunshine. The oriental poppies promise another flamboyant fashion show in a few months, when they will flower in shades of red, purple, pink, watermelon, white and orange. This week, I'll also do some scatter-planting of flower seeds, especially the “bread seed” poppy seeds I saved from last summer's blooms. In this in-between season, I'm feeling ready for spring.