Now That We Have A Mutual Understanding...

“Now that we have this mutual understanding, let’s talk about your weight. You are getting very fat kitty cat. What happened?”

She used to answer me with an emphatic meow. Now I wonder if she is even listening with her eyes closed. Her ears look attentive, maybe I’m being ignored.

“Hey! Hey you, yes I’m talking to you. Yes, now that I have your attention, we need to address this problem. You are getting too fat, and I want you to live a long and happy life, so we’re gonna fix this. You are going on a diet little lady, with exercise. We’ll do this together, you and me,” I said, and she gave me the look.

Her facial expression said she wasn’t happy about being disturbed.

“Exercise, yeah right,” as she flipped her ears backwards, offended.

She closed her eyes and went right back to sleep.

Where did I go wrong? Let’s see, where do I begin?

Creature comforts, let’s start there, and so I got rid of them, all of them, the soft cushions and pillows strategically placed near the windows for basking, access to the bedrooms during the day, the all you can eat buffets, all of it gone, and then I really got the look.

“I know I’m sorry. This was my fault, I thought this was love, but I made you fat and lazy. Come on, help me out here,” I said, but she was not interested, only upset and tempting me to give her back her comforts by being cute and cuddly.

“Stop it! Let’s go.”

I picked her up. Her legs got useless, and she preferred to be carried now. I trekked outside, put her down and she sat, and then almost instantly she was on her side basking with butterflies and everything else almost crawling over her. This was serious, but it was life after the pandemic. We were out and about, and getting back into our daily routine of work and errands while the cat stayed home, locked up inside.

How could I make her remember how to be a cat? The answer came immediately. She was feeding off our energy. We were at home less, and gave her larger portions of food to last her throughout the day. She spent most of her time locked inside while we were away and there was nothing for her to do but eat, sleep, and bask in warm sunshine cuddled on soft cushions and pillows. Over time, she got addicted to this lifestyle. Yes, this really was our fault, and we had to fix it.

I remembered her the way she was, and it was time to help her remember too. So I got her a surprise, one of the first things she fell in love with, a string!

Her eyes went wild when she saw it, the look in her eyes, “Yes, this is my thing, a string! Let’s do this,” her eyes, they spoke to me loud and clear.

She perked up and started jumping around to catch it!

“Look at you, fat little kitty! You’re enjoying this, come on! You can do it! Almost, almost!” my excitement was more than hers watching her play again.

We did this for a long time. Me, the cat, and the string, and she wasn’t getting tired of it. I brought the string outside, threw one end over a high limb on the avocado tree tied to a rock and dragged it up, wow! I didn’t even know she was brave enough to climb so high, and she climbed back down on her own, as nimble as the fittest feline on earth, with the string in her mouth.

In the night I thought she would be tired, but while I was in bed trying to sleep, she got busy grabbing my toes under the sheets as I moved them around, it was another fun game we invented, right before bedtime.

In the morning she came meowing, waking me up to get the day started with a ten minute round of string by the bedside. She would hide under the bed and try to catch it while I dangled it over the edge before I got up to prepare for work. I tied some strings around the house to keep her entertained while we were away. She played with them. The edges were all frayed by her. In the evenings she was at the door to welcome us home. She was getting busier and busier and we loved it!

The weekends! Oh my we played! Hide and seek first. She hid behind the curtains on the windowsills and pounced, always winning. This was a game she played mostly with my mother who learned how impossible it is to sneak up on a cat, but they will get the drop on you one hundred per cent of the time. She had to be weary of the curtains!

 Stones, what could be so entertaining about a stone? We caught her playing with one outdoors and decided to leave her one in the house. During the night we learned that kicking a stone around is fun when no one else is around to kick it back. We heard it banging on doors and walls throughout the night.

Cardboard boxes; we threw them out regularly. After removing some outdated files from one and burning them, we came inside and saw kitty playing in the box. We watched her or a very long time too. What else?

Outside I threw a stick. That was too ambitious.

“You must think I’m a dog,” she said, with her eyes and ears, twitching her ears back and forth as she looked at the stick then at me, still sitting.

That game was abandoned on the first try. Kitties don’t fetch; they play ball. So I found her ball and brought it outside. Now we were really getting somewhere. She missed that, and we kicked the ball around for a good hour or two. I got tired and stopped. She begged me to continue but I was too tired.

Two weeks went by, and that big wiggly, jiggly belly of hers looked a lot trimmer. The cat was showing us the error of our ways. What we thought was love, wasn’t. We spoiled her with all the comforts of life, but she wasn’t happy. She was lonely, fat and depressed, a place in life we knew very well, and we were doing it to the cat.

 It was time for a new mutual understanding. This time it was our turn to make some changes. We were going to love her the way a cat should be loved; the way she was loved when we first met her. She would remember how to be a cat again, and love it.

We kept up the new routine with strings, cardboard boxes, stones and sneaky curtains. We gave her less food and let her enjoy time outdoors in the evenings and stayed out there with her. She ate lizards and climbed the avocado tree. Sometimes she just ran, like she was in the wild. Burning fat felt good, it showed on her face too, the adrenaline rush.

‘Letting the cat out of the bag’ has meaning, we were letting her out of the house, but how nice it was of our neighbor to adopt a big, cat-hating, angry dog, right when we were letting her out again. The man kept him in chains in his backyard, but his bark sounded terrible. It was the sound of thunder on a cloudless day, and it just didn’t belong. As if the cat wasn’t depressed enough. Now she refused to go outside any at all. The dog was not having it.

“Woof,”

That was all she needed to hear, and she didn’t even look out the door.

We had to show her it was safe to be out there in the yard, so we stayed around the outside of the house where she could see us with the dog yapping over the fence. She took her time, but eventually came out, tentatively. She felt safest in the trees so that’s where she spent her time, and we tied some strings in them too so she could still play up there and ignore the foaming, jealous dog. Time passed and she got comfortable again in the yard, knowing the dog was not a threat to her. Over time the dog accepted his miserable lot in life too, watching a cat roam free right next door.

“Woof,” was all he could say, and go right back to sleep.

At night, bedtime was clock work. She caught my toes, grabbing them as they wiggled under the sheets. She even started talking to me again with her sweet little meows. There was no going back. We found each other again and her meows sounded a lot like ‘thank you’, and sometimes, ‘I love you’. We understood love. Love your cat and it will love you back, but she loved us first. Now it was our turn. Helping our cat remember how to be a cat is a mutual understanding. It was when we first met her; she helped us remember how to be human.

THE END