Lookit! Lookit! Lookit!

Saturday, March 13th — You know how little children, when they suddenly acquire a new skill and want you to come and admire their prowess, yell, “Lookit! Lookit!” — presumably a contraction of “Look at this!”?

I swear that NewCat Hope was saying the same thing today… all day long.

We have a cat-flap in our kitchen window. It’s an arrangement of heavy plastic sheeting that Robert contrived when Amy first came to live with us eleven years ago, and it works like those pet-flaps installed in wooden doors. The cats can let themselves in and out through the cat-flap: on the inside, there’s the counter next to the sink, and on the outside there’s a ledge that was, I suppose, designed to allow for passing things in and out through the window.  Picture a  barbecue, with the Little Woman indoors preparing the side dishes and salads, and the Stalwart Hubby, barbecue tools in hand, minding the steaks and chicken breasts on the grill. (Maybe that happened with the couple who lived here originally, but it is certainly not OUR style.)

Anyway: the cat-flap had been blocked off since Hope’s arrival, so she could become accustomed to us and to her new home before going outside. The barricade consisted of a large and very heavy cardboard volume file, in which the Beloved Spouse stores offprints of his scientific articles. I can barely lift it myself, with my sore shoulders.

When I went out to lunch with friends yesterday at 1:00 p.m., both Hope and Chloe were indoors, snoozing on their respective chairs. When I returned at 3:30, the barricade was down. I mean REALLY down — lying on the counter — and it had knocked over the spin-around wooden spice rack and its 16 bottles, so that the wooden rack, all the bottles, and a lot of the spices were scattered over the floor.

There were cat scratches on the top and sides of the file box, and the cat-flap was waving gently in the breeze. It had to have been Hopie — Chloe is way too fat and indolent to have bothered trying to remove the barrier. But Hope had been asking to be let out the door when I left, and I had told her she had to stay in till I got home, and then she could go.

I can just picture her, scratching and shoving at the heavy, heavy file box; ultimately knocking it down, and probably scared by the crash as the spice rack hit the floor. She doubtless took off running… but then, when nothing untoward happened and nobody appeared to clean up the mess, she hopped up on the counter and… WOW!! The flap was open! There was OUTDOORS, accessible at will.

So, as I salvaged what I could of the spice rack and put away the file box, there was Miss Hope, leaping to the counter and zooming out the flap, jumping off the ledge to the patio chair and thence to the patio.  And in two minutes or less, there she was, zooming in reverse. Lookit! Lookit! Lookit! she was clearly saying; Hey, look at what I can do! I figured it out myself! Hey, LOOK at me! Isn’t this neat? Back and forth, back and forth, till it got dark — WOW! I can get OUT! Lookit! And then,  It gets better: I can also get IN! Come on, look at me!

Fortunately, she was pretty well worn out by her adventuring, and slept all night on the bed with me. But it won’t be long till she’s checking out the World of Night as well.

Funny, how much alike cats and children are.

Thanks for reading — Betsy