Piney and the Displaced Cat Tree

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© Catherine Haslag

Goldie

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© Catherine Haslag

Piney

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She started as a foster kitten. My boyfriend’s foster kitten three years before he was my boyfriend. Rather than being adopted by another family, he kept her, loved her, made her part of his. He was happy to turn his apartment into a kitty play place for her, for all of the kittens he fostered. He has a heart bigger than any space can hold.

I met Piney for the first time in Spring 2020. She is a skittish cat. She typically runs when someone walks her way. She hides from guests. She is scared of the loud, the unfamiliar, the new. She took to me quickly. Let me rub her belly. Slept on my feet. The next time I saw her weeks later she came running to me, begging in her cat way to have her head and neck scratched. This was unusual for her and her humans noticed.

When my boyfriend needed to be away from home for weeks to handle a family matter, I offered to take her so he didn’t need to worry about her. So she didn’t need to be alone. She spent the first day hiding in the covers on the floor at the foot of my bed. She snuck around the house, afraid of everything. All the sounds were new, the smells were different, and her male human was nowhere around. It was just us girls and she was uncertain.

It took some time, but she started to venture out. She didn’t run when I walked past her or bent to scratch behind her ears. She snuggled at my feet in the evening when I read and slept between my legs at night. She found the squirrels that live in the tree on my patio and tracked the birds that perch in the front bush. She climbed to the top of her cat tree and watched the cars pass on the street. She made this her home and picked me as her human. She became a different feline. My boyfriend was amazed at the change in Piney and decided she had picked her forever home. She stayed with me.

Piney has become my 4-legged furry teacher. Slowly wedging herself into my life. Between the covers of my bed. Balancing like a gymnast on my headboard and dismounting onto my nightstand. Our relationship expanded from sleepover buddy to roommate.

I am very particular about my home, yet she has charmed me into buying a cat tree for the office, a small hidey-hole for her in the living room, and rearrange my kitchen to allow space for a litter box. I love having her here, but living alone for the past 5 years has caused me to atrophy. I am not as malleable as I once was. Piney has made this clear to me. Loving her is easy but making physical space in my home for her has been a challenge.

I have become rigid in my middle-age. My adult life has been guided by routines, plans, and Google Calendar. Piney doesn’t fit in any of those. She can’t be scheduled and her needs are different than mine. She is teaching me to make space for the unscheduleable, for the belly rubs on the carpet at 6:13a and the catnap at my feet at 7:42p. She has left her paw marks on my heart, her fur on my couch, and kitty litter everywhere.

She is slowly prying me open to her, open to life. Reminding me that the best things in life aren’t planned. That there is time in the morning to sit and stretch for a minute. That your perspective can change with a purr and a good neck scratch. That change can bring good things into your life.

© Catherine Haslag

What’s In a Smell?

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It is a few weeks before Christmas and I am cat-sitting for my boyfriend. He has a beautiful 3-year old female black, grey, brown, and white feline named Piney. She is a skittish cat. She doesn’t like to be picked up or carried. She isn’t a lap cat by any means; however, she is incredibly curious, especially when it comes to smell. She sniffs everything. The spider plant hanging from the office ceiling. The Christmas presents stacked in the corner. The baseboards running around the living room. She sniffs carefully, completely as if she is getting the whole history of the room and its contents through her nose.

Piney, the curious sniffing feline.

She begins to sniff around the cabinet I use as a TV stand, a small art-deco style piece with sliding front doors. I began to ponder what her nose detects.

Can she smell the homes it sat in before I purchased it from a flea market on Commercial Street? Can she detect the distressed red paint that covered it when I first brought it home? Does she smell how I stripped and refinished the cabinet on the balcony of the first apartment my then-husband and I shared? Does she inhale the aroma of the white china with silver decoration I once stored in it in the dining room of that apartment?

Does she detect notes of the first house I owned with my ex-husband? This cabinet sat in the living room, to the right of the TV. A silver dish my then mother-in-law gave me sitting on top of it. Can she smell the parties and movie nights we threw during the 2 years we lived there together? Does she detect hints of the fire that started on the deck the morning after my birthday party? A cigarette someone didn’t put out properly in the container on the deck.

Does she breathe in any notes of the end of our marriage? The arguments, tears, and stress of two humans realizing they don’t work together…or who maybe never really worked at all.

Does she smell the home I lived in on Main Street? Single again. Finding my way forward.

Is there an odor from the moving truck, a cold, crisp January whiff of winter leaking into the tractor-trailer as it cruises up the interstate towards its new home? Can she detect the work of settling into a new town, new state, finding a new way?

Or does she just smell wood, stain, and dust from 7 years of the cabinet sitting in one place?