Cat Girls Are Complicated

Meaning me and you, and yes, the cats too.

Now that childless cat ladies have entered the world stage as a political caucus, we have a legitimate news hook for an update on Saint-Maxime’s favorite sisterwives. It’s been a while since our last check-in. Things have continued to evolve. Pets are teachers. Here are our most recent lessons:

1)        Forgiveness

I thought we had gotten the free-range pooping under control. No such luck. With the arrival this May of the stepdaughter and a gang of other ladies for a weekend of preparing for their crazy-stressful college prep exams, Eleanor and Lucy experienced a disturbance in the force.

The visit was a good idea for the humans, and it seemed the same for the cats. Or at least for Eleanor. The minute someone walks through my front door, she is splayed out in front of them, belly up, looking for some action. It was also a long-anticipated meeting for the stepdaughter, a cat enthusiast. She had gotten the shaft from Fred and Penelope, the cats she lived with for years, who struggled or ran away whenever she dared try to pick them up. She was long overdue for a cuddle.

While Lucy hid, Eleanor rubbed up against everyone’s legs, flopped down on the table in the middle of where the girls had their study materials spread out, checked into guest bedrooms as people were getting dressed, and generally made the scene. Lucy even emerged near the end of the first night, shyly poking her head around corners and scratching out a little peep of a meow every now and again. We were having a girl party.

And then the morning after, the stepdaughter found a turd package on the living room rug. The first after at least six months of nothing. They regressed in an instant and have stayed there ever since.

Pooping en plein air about every two days is now, once again, the routine. As I write this, it is Saturday night. I am just back from a really nice dinner at my American neighbors Tom and Callahan’s. Their four-year-old daughter twirled around to Mozart in her pajamas, we had duck breast and lovely wine and beheld the garden, and now, back on my living room couch as I digest and noodle on this text before bed, I can smell a too-familiar odor wafting up from behind me. One of them dropped a bomb in my presence, one minute ago. In full contentment. I put the computer down and yelled at them both as I flushed somebody’s butt-apples down the laundry room toilet. They seemed startled by my noise but otherwise unburdened by what came before, if you like.

I have no answers. Both of them are doing it. They don’t have a litterbox phobia. I moved the downstairs one to a more open location and they deign to use it half time. I guess they just find the wool yarn irresistible beneath their feet as they release their colons? Or something? I cannot find logic and it has caused some angst. But what are we going to do?

2)        Self-inquiry