Our Stairway
Week in and week out, we don’t venture upstairs in our house. Too many steps (18)! Too steep! No reason. Everything we want or need is downstairs.
Every now and then, though, a friend will bring a visitor and they will ask (usually tentatively) for a house tour. Or, more frequently, we need to go up there to get the rooms spiffed up for houseguests. So it was that yesterday Nyel came down from vacuuming duties with the announcement that Osa-the-Cat “has been entertaining up there.”
Telltale Evidence
We know that she spends a good part of everyday sleeping upstairs. And we know that she believes in giving equal time to every pillow on every bed. The dents in our neatly made up rooms tell us so. But what Nyel discovered was a total rearrangement of pillows in the north bedroom. They had been fashioned into a sort of nest near the headboard and camouflaged by pillows that were left in place toward the front. The view from the doorway was ‘as usual.’
Trysting Scene?
Being the tidy kind of guy he is, he put everything back together so when I went up to plump and arrange and put out towels, the nest was gone. Another photo op missed! Plus, I wondered if Mrs. Crouch was perhaps Osa’s cuddle-mate and if there would be even a hint of her left behind.
I can’t think of who else would be upstairs nestling amongst the pillows with Osa. I’m quite sure she hasn’t had any feline company, although she still looks longingly (or is it menacingly?) out the windows at any neighbor cats who venture into our yard. But to invite them into her upstairs hide-away? I don’t think so.
Osas-the-Silent
It’s comforting to know, though, that she has settled in to such an extent upstairs. Too, there are signs, though few and far between, that she is warming up to us. Like the day recently that she settled herself right on Nyel’s chest as he was drifting off for a midday nap on the couch. And there she stayed, happily, for a full two hours.
Maybe, eventually, Osa will confide in us about her upstairs shenanigans. Although… I wouldn’t have thought that she’s “that” kind of girl
Back in the ’70s we had two cats who used a hole in the top of our screen door as a cat-door during the summer months. One time we went off to the beach for the weekend and left the back door open, but the screen locked (rather naïvely) and locked the front door. When we came back our oldest and largest cat was sitting in one rocking chair and a cross-eyed cat, we’d never seen before, companionably sitting in the other rocking chair. When we walked in there was a moment when you could read the cats minds. “Holy crap, the parents are home!” Then the cross-eye cat leapt up and scooted out the screen hole in a flash. We laughed and laughed at our teenage cat being caught having company!
Or how ’bout the cat pretender that came into Bette Lu Krause house while she was gone on a voyage in whale country. It looked nearly exactly like her real own cat but was bigger and nastier and took up residence and wouldn’t let her cat back in the house. She finally got the switcheroo figured out when she got back, but in the meantime her cat was left out in the cold wondering, “What the heck?!” Cats obviously have their own rules of conduct. But we knew that!