Three or four years ago, not long after my daughter and I had "acquired" her tuxedo cat (might have been an accidental kidnaping, might have been a rescue just in time--we will never know for sure), we were doing some remodeling to our New Mexico house. We moved a bunch of furniture into the dining room, so we could pull up the living room carpeting, and install wood flooring. The new cat had just been spayed, and we were trying to keep her out of the way, so she neither got injured nor escaped while we were hauling out the old floor coverings. We didn't see her at the food bowls the night after we worked, but we thought maybe it was because she was just hiding and recovering from her surgery. When she wasn't around at breakfast time, we started to get very concerned. We looked all over the house, and then scoured the neighborhood, convinced she had escaped. We called the vet (who was conveniently located four blocks away), to see whether anyone had brought her in to them. We put up signs around the neighborhood. And we held back worried tears, because she had already become very dear to us. She had been missing a little more than a day and a half when I went to retrieve a tool from the pile of furniture in the dining room, and I heard a noise. I followed the sound. My man had inherited a vintage record cabinet from his uncle, and we store CDs in it. It has a swing out door, sort of like an antique flour bin or laundry chute. That door had come open, and the little cat had crawled in and rocked it shut with her body weight. Because we weren't in the dining room, we didn't hear her call us. She came out of the cabinet, and found the entire house changed radically, with stacked furniture, and a huge empty room bereft of carpet. We decided that to her, it must have felt like being in a time machine, locked away in the dark for hours and coming out to an unfamiliar world.
Tonight, to combat the vile emissions of the boy dog who never leaves my side, I dug out some new, holiday-scented candles from my coat closet. As soon as I lit them, I sat back down and started writing in the NaNoWriMo book. After maybe an hour going back and forth between writing and staring with unseeing eyes at the cable news, I started becoming aware of a noise. I couldn't quite identify it, but it sounded a bit like a cat digging around through something that did not qualify as cat toys. Eventually I pinpointed the sound to the coat closet. I thought about how long it had been since I had been walked on by the kitten. Indeed, a freshly-spayed, long-haired kitten had stumbled into another time machine. Oh, the irony. (I have been noticing several other ways that she resembles my daughter's cat, not the least of which is how much of a bully she is.) Other than one quick prance across my collarbone, that snotty little Ewok hasn't shown the least bit of gratitude for being saved from spending a cold, dark night in that time machine.
As I mentioned last night, it was time to bring my ficus in from the front porch, now that it is getting chilly at night. I needed to go to Target tonight to shop from a friend's bridal registry, so of course I found myself in the back corner of the store, looking for some tiny little LED lights. I wanted an all-green strand, or even better, a pale green set. What I wanted wasn't to be had, but what I found might have been better. I got tiny, warm white lights, that actually twinkle! (Apparently that hasn't been a popular feature in the last ten years, so I was happy to find it.) The whole idea was to create the effect of lightning bugs in a bush, to set the mood while I wrote a story set during the summer, in the early 1970s. I think it will help put me in the right frame of mind. It's my own time machine.
Now I just need to keep the cats out of the base of the tree. I had barely shut the door with it inside when it had twenty pounds of black cat inside it (net weight).
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