The Cat Chronicles

 Day 15

This is the day, in what was supposed to be my new home for life, my humans went over the edge – around the bend – off the deep end with no life preserver.

My humans planted a tree in the house!

They planted a tree in the house.  No kidding.  A gigantic, touch-the-ceiling monster. It’s so tall I don’t think I could climb to the top of it even with a flying leap. Of course, it would be an interesting experiment…

They brought it into the house while I was sleeping. I smelled it before I saw it. And, when I did, I admit I freaked out.  I ran, I hid, and I took another nap. Later in the day, I went to see if it was still there.  It might have been a bad dream.

There's cold white stuff outside

Nope.  Still there.  Don’t ask me what kind of a tree it is.  I’m a Florida cat. I know six kinds of palm trees. I can tell you the difference between a jacaranda and a royal poinciana, and I’m only eight months old.  But I’m not in Florida anymore, and it isn’t just that three-hour plane ride.  There’s this white stuff all over the ground, and it’s cold (I put my nose against a window; a mistake I won’t make twice).

Day 16

This morning, they put lights on it!

This morning, my humans went even further over the edge.  They put lights all over the tree.  Hundreds of them! Give me one good reason why a tree needs lights.  It isn’t going anywhere and it’s not exactly a navigation hazard.  My two humans are going to be carted off to the loony bin and no one is going to feed me.  But putting on lights wasn’t the end of their lunatic behavior: they disappeared downstairs (I had no idea this place had a ‘downstairs’! But now I do…) and they came up with giant plastic bins that smelled… old.  They opened them and I smelled years of stuff.

Being just eight months old, I’m still getting the hang of this time thing.  I talked it over with some of the other cats in that hotel they had me in when I first came up from Florida.  They explained to me first you’re a kitten and then you’re a cat.  You’re a cat for, like, twenty years, with your muzzle growing whiter each year, and then

your time is up.  I asked how long humans lived and no one had a clue.  Assuming we all live the same number of years, I’m guessing (based on my male human’s gray hair) my humans are around 15 years old, which means in five years I’ve got to find some different humans to be my staff.  Except this pair is going to be in an institution just as soon as some other human gets a load of the tree they’ve planted in the house.

Oh, and after lunch, they started taking all this old stuff out of the boxes and putting it on the tree.  And, I don’t mean just throwing it on the tree.  There must have been six hundred gizmos in those two bins, and every one of them had to go in one certain place.  They even got all misty-eyed when they pulled out stuff.  I’m still getting the hang of human-speak, but they’re all

weepy and reminding each other about where they were when they got each of those gizmos (Harrod’s? Is that a human? A city?) Egypt? Amsterdam? What’s that?

The interesting thing is, every object they put on the tree smells different. I smell different times and places, but they’ve all been together for different lengths of time – as though my humans collected this stuff and saved it just to put on the tree.  How weird is that?

Day 17

This morning, they let me into the room where they keep the tree.  I think I finally get it.  For the first time, I got to really smell the gizmos (my humans call them ‘ornaments’). I smelled three things.  The first is where they came from, which I’ll probably never sort out.  The second thing is that they’ve been on lots of other trees before this one. I smelled a few ornaments that had the scent of more than fifty different trees.  So, this isn’t the first tree my humans have brought into this home.  I figure they bring in new ones – what? – once a year, maybe?

They finally thought they had thrown
enough gizmos on the tree

The third thing was the real eye-opener.  I’m not the first cat to have laid a paw on these ornaments.  Some of the ornaments have been sniffed at by one cat; and some by as many as three. (The three-cat ornaments are really, really old.)

I’ve got a lot to ponder here.  Maybe they haven’t gone completely around the bend.  Maybe this is one more kind of stupid human trick. Whatever it is, I’ll keep an open mind.  As long as the food keeps coming.