Paradise Found

Every year for the past few years, a group of us get together to go bird hunting in North Dakota. My husband found a pretty good short term rental on some farm land. It has a kitchen, sweeping views, and this past year, cats.

We showed up and there were cats everywhere. Eventually we counted seven of them, although near the end of our stay, two more showed up. I immediately wanted all of them, but my husband, who likes to make up history, claimed we had a prenup declaring us a two cat household. This is patently false, as no woman in the history of my matriarchal lineage would ever marry someone with such a policy.

But while my husband was re-writing our history, I was busy letting all the cats into the rental, which really spun up my friend, a farm kid himself, who could not, on day one, abide having cats inside the house.

In order to assuage all of the male humans, we let the cats back outside. After a little while though, we quit seeing them at the windows. The male humans figured the cats went to wherever they normally lived, but the sudden lack of cats was something that anyone with an actual cat-dar would have immediately found suspicious.

We had, while the cats were inside, shut the bedroom doors. A few hours later, I opened our bedroom to go to bed and... I found the cats.

My husband had opened the window, not wide, but big enough for a cat head to get through, and all seven cats were on our bed, sleeping.

I literally found my version of heaven.

The male humans freaked out though. There was a lot of yelling, which the cats found offensive–they were sleeping after all. The cats got put back outside, which many of the life forms involved did not think was the right course of action.

We spent a nice week with nine farm cats, and while I did not manage to sneak any into our truck for our drive home, we did get a parting gift from them. Two weeks later we all got ringworm, well all of us but the former farm kid.

"We are a two cat household! This is why!" my husband cursed while applying topical anti-fungal cream to his arm.

It's like he doesn't know who he married. Anti-fungal cream is available over the counter, and a little ringworm never stopped anyone, especially someone with my genetics.

I can wait, be it a year, or a decade, but I know, one day, opportunity will present itself in the form of a third cat.

And I will be ready.