Furry and Feathered Friends

Our lives revolve around our animals. Inside it’s our three pussycats and I’m the chef for their various meals. They eat at different times so I’m pretty busy all day with service. I run a cat café. Ginger likes a lightly fried egg with a runny yolk, cut up and put on her plate, away from the others. I know when she’s hungry. She enters the room and stares at me. That’s her signal. Then she waits patiently. Domino, her son, whines like a creaky door that needs oiling and trips me as I try to go into the kitchen to feed him. He is always impatient for his food and he consumes twice as much as the others. He’s a growing boy but all muscle. The only time he really settles down is when he’s asleep on our bed, often preventing me from getting in, because he’s in my spot and out like a light, comatose or maybe it’s catatose. But whatever it is, he is quite impossible to move or wake up. So I sometimes have to sleep like a pretzel and wake up in a fairly rotten mood. But then there’s Shaq and he is such a love but he’s losing his marbles a bit and wants to sit on my chair when I’m there, and once he goes outside he follows John like a shadow. At night he often sleeps right near John’s head on the edge of the bed and sometimes drops off onto the floor. But his new trick lately is to go out in the middle of the night and return with a wee mouse and a loud meow, proudly proclaiming his catch that he occasionally releases. The petrified mouse will then scurry away into the wilderness behind the furniture. At that point all three cats will sit and stare at that area as if they’re glued to the spot. Thankfully though, they have stopped bringing in poor little bunnies every night. That’s been reduced to about once a week now.

Our other friends, the ones with the feathers, live outside but make so much noise at times you’d think that they were inside, which they sometimes do if the gate is ajar and the front door open. They like to find the dry cat food that might be on the floor on a plate in the kitchen, so they go on a small journey of discovery when they’re inside. But usually a whole bunch of them cackle and crow and cluck and shriek just a few steps from our door as they throw around the straw I put on the garden soil, looking for a scrap of food to eat. These guys will dig down to China to find that special morsel.  They are very good diggers but I’m not usually thrilled to see the messes they excavate daily. So I spend a lot of time sweeping and picking up an assortment of these discards that land on our brick pathway or concrete path with regularity. The fallen leaves just add to this detritus, but at least they’re attractive with their burnished colors covering up some of the excavated soil until pretty soon our paths are covered again. This is called the dirty it up/clean it up program, a futile exercise that keeps me fit I guess. But I find myself spending more and more time holding onto that broom and then John asks if I’m going for a flight or have I just returned. That usually terminates my outside sweeping duties and I return to my post inside to put together the chicken’s breakfast for the next day. They get a layered meal with lettuce leaves torn into strips, some bread also torn into edible crumbs, any parings, some crushed eggshells. an assortment of cat food that’s dried onto the cat plate, some dog roll, chopped up of course for extra protein (theirs is the pricey one that smells like meatloaf with garlic in it), any leftovers except chicken, large soup bones with scraps of meat on them and anything else I can think of. On really cold days, after they get their late afternoon pellets and seeds they also have porridge I cook for them, to bolster them. We have about 40 chickens now, including the new lot of babies that get their own bowl of food twice a day in their house but also eat with the others.

I guess I could have called this place, the House of Meow and Cluck, but really, there are a lot of cluckers here that drown out the felines and the roosters start around 4 a.m. every day. So they rule the roost. OF course when I visit my daughter, my darling husband gets to feed these hungry critters but he does it quite differently. He isn’t chained to the kitchen like I am and he wouldn’t bother with most of these additional treats.

So when I come back home after a few weeks away all of these animals seem really thrilled to see me walking up the pathway. Hmm.