The house is quiet with the men out of town, which makes it much easier to hear the sounds I'm accustomed to ignoring, from the wail of the woodburner to the call of the cat. The cat wonders where the young man is. "He's in Texas looking at a college," I tell her, but she just looks at me with "Feed me" in her eyes. I point out that I just fed her a little while ago and there's plenty of food in her dish. Somehow, this fails to satisfy.
Satisfying the woodburner is another problem entirely. I can count on the cat to come crawling around my ankles when she's hungry, but the woodburner has selected a more nefarious method: it has wheedled its way into my subconscious mind, where it patiently waits until I am sound asleep and then jerks me to alertness with an urgent demand that I feed the fire. "But I already fed you," I tell the woodburner. "Now go away and let me sleep." So it goes off and sulks in my subconscious again until I'm just edging into blissful sleep and then there it is again, that panicky voice screaming "Feed the fire!"
It doesn't matter how many times I tell the woodburner "I just fed you," because its listening skills are no better than the cat's. In fact, the cat is so adept at ignoring all communiques from Planet Human that I ought to take advantage of that skill. The next time the fully-loaded woodburner comes screaming to me for more wood, I'll try a different approach. "Go tell it to the cat," I'll say. "I'm sure she'll listen."
No comments:
Post a Comment