re teenagers: Tess is the oldest, Tilden is the crazy boy cat, and Tina is the smallest and shyest of the trio. We didn’t intend to have three cats, but when the well-meaning cat rescue person found out we were in the market and offered to bring Tina by to meet us, she just-so-happened to bring Tilden since the kittens had bonded since they were rescued from whatever dire circumstances had landed them in foster care, weeks earlier. I am not so stupid or, for that matter heartless, to deny a needy pair of foundling kittens a good home –in spite of the fact that everybody involved and the multi-tiered layers of cat rescue bureaucracy assured us that we needn’t take either one, but certainly we were not under any obligation to take both.
Yeah right. Have you seen their faces? They knew a couple of softies when they saw them.
When Chip Wood, our carpenter, finished redoing our kitchen a few years ago, he promised he’d bring a new grill for the heater vent. While we waited, Melissa inherited her grandmother’s chiffarobe, an old wooden chest which we quickly converted to a kitchen storage unit. Its legs are high enough to allow heat to blow out of the vent into the kitchen.
One recent morning, about sun up, Tess is in the bed, purring like a Wankel engine. Tilden and Tina are on the periphery, clearing their kitty throats and making thumping noises. This is a group effort to get chow on the table. I have always contended that if cats could figure out how to open food cans, they’d have nothing to do with humans. But they can’t, Melissa is up, kettle on the burner and three cats weave around her ankles in the throes of starvation. She ladles kitty gloop into the dishes and, if they approve of the menu selection, it’s feeding frenzy time.
After breakfast, the three cats clean themselves, often in the warmth of a sunbeam and then they have a wrestling match. This mostly involves the bigger cats, Tess and Tilden, and includes running all over the house, thumping, bumping and drooling on each other’s heads. Tina usually separates herself from the fray in self-preservation. After the hours-long sparring match, the cats go to neutral corners and become docile and approachable, allowing us to come close enough to elicit purrs and pats. Tess and Tilden hang out in the bay window and Tina has a heating pad in the corner of the living room where she likes to melt.
Those with cat know-how inform us that these two new cats must get used to human contact. Something that holds no interest to either of them. On a this morning, Melissa bent down to pick up the little cat and she darted out from between her fingers, and bee-lined under the ancestral chiffarobe and, to Melissa’s horror, Tina hopped right into the heating vent, still waiting the grill cover from Chip Wood.
I was, at the time, sleeping off the night shift in my attic man cave, ear plugs in place, likely snoring the rafters loose.
Melissa, panicking, envisioned Tina trapped in the bowels of our ancient heating system, unable to escape certain incineration as gravity brought her closer to the burner. With the recent autumnal temperatures, there was a decent chance that the furnace would fire up at any moment. Thinking on her feet, Melissa went straight to the thermostat to make sure nothing would happen to this little white, orange and gray ball of fluff before the fire department arrived or animal control or she went up the stairs and woke the sleeping giant.
“Lower the number on the thermostat,” Melissa thought and she did just that. In doing so, she actually made the furnace go on. Oh no! Reverse: Temperature higher! Temperature higher!
Furnace off, she then went over to the chiffarobe and summoning her yoga strength, slid it away from the heating duct. Peering into the vent, she noticed a baffle below floor level that was balanced like teeter totter with such precision that the strength of the blast from the fan could control the baffle’s position in the ductwork. But NO tina.
Contemplating her next move, Melissa knew bribing the kitten out of the labyrinth with food was out, as she had a full belly. Clearly feline insecurity negated any chance of luring her from within the darkness with comforting chirps and promises of cat cuddling. Tina, on a good day, will have nothing to do with that sort of nonsense.
Just as she decided to call 911 and live with the sad possibility of losing a third cat in so many months she noticed the little cat in the corner of the dining room, calmly licking her paw.
It appears that Tina was too light to tip the baffle and had somehow hopped out of harm’s way while Melissa was fussing with the thermostat.
Cats 1, Humans 0.
I slept through the whole thing. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net
