The Birds

Ever since Snug came to live with us, our cats (Buttons and Benni) have chosen a life of isolation--a life spent specifically and entirely in my and Baroy's bedroom. There, they are safe from the large, slobbery beast, who is kept from venturing upstairs by a baby gate at the bottom of our stairs. (Our bedroom, which was an add-on built in the 1970s, is accessed by a staircase that descends directly into the kitchen; that bedroom, along with a not-so-masterly bathroom, makes up the entirety of our upstairs suite. I love that room and, in particular, the huge plate glass window that takes up one entire wall of it and looks into the mountains looming above our foothill home...but that's beside the point.)

Neither Benni nor Buttons seems particularly put out by having their territory so severely curtailed; it was their own choice, after all, to fight us literally tooth and nail when we tried to run through the 'introducing your cat and dog' checklists we'd found when we first decided to adopt Snug. They have their food, they sleep on our bed, the kids come up and play with them. They enter and exit the house through the now-unscreened window in our bedroom, which leads out onto a rooftop. They seem perfectly happy. And we don't mind it, either. Except for the birds.

Or, I should say, the dead birds. And the dead lizards. And the live lizards. And the dead rats. And the live rats.

There really is nothing quite like climbing the stairs to your bedroom at midnight to find a perfect circle of feathers spread across the carpeting, with a tiny wren-like bird at the epicenter. Unless, of course, it's pulling back the curtain to your tub to find a tail-less lizard skittering around the porcelain bottom. Or unless it's hearing a terrified squeaking only to discover a terrified baby rat who has taken up residence in the milk crate of out-of-season clothes you keep in your closet. Or unless it's taking that crate downstairs to free the terrified rat and finding, when you dump the clothes out, that there was a de-tailed lizard in there, too.

(The former, by the way, was last night. And a week ago. The lizard: at least once a week. The three rats, one live, two dead: early summer.)

All I can do is shudder and wonder, what's next? A squirrel carcass wrapped in my bath towel? An oppossum in my underwear drawer?

Only time will tell, I fear.

Welcome to my world.