Dolly Gee Squeakers has burrowed her way into a tunnel of pants, socks, and tee-shirts.
Like many of us, Dolly, a long-hair Siamese/badger mix, a cat with a penchant for souvenir ashtrays and menthol cigarettes, has parts of the house she prefers.
And she prefers the bathroom.
Don’t get me wrong: bathrooms are a perfectly acceptable place to hang out. I myself have had occasion, on weekend evenings that do not invite close examination, to spend time in a bathroom. A bathroom is a quiet place, a place with running water and various half-spent tubes of lipstick, a place of over-the-counter medications and, if you’re lucky, a particularly well-thumbed copy of the book of Mysterious Events and Fantastical Creatures.
Did you know that the Jersey Devil has been sighted in recent times in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey?
If you spent any time in this particular bathroom, you would.
“Dolly.”
“Hmmm?” The cat is up to her olfactory senses in the rich evocative smells of a used towel, and she looks up, her bright blue eyes slightly crossed.
Liza Bean Bitey, of the Minneapolis Biteys, a symmetrically stripe puss currently locked in a lawsuit with Donald Trump over a threat she may or may not have made the last time she was in New York City, saunters past the open bathroom door, pauses and backs up.
“She’s been rolling in a pile of underwear and trousers for the past hour. I suggest someone“ – and here she clears her throat delicately – “either do another load or put them back in the hamper.” Liza Bean grins, emerald eyes shining. “You’d think she never smelt the laundry before.”
Dolly Gee lies flat on her back in the middle of the laundry, arms and legs akimbo, the least seaworthy of canoes. She smiles in that silent kitty way of hers.
Maybe I’ll leave the pile a little longer.