He's baaaack
This entry was posted on 9/19/2006 9:45 PM and is filed under blather.
I think my cat is possessed.
So what else is new, right? Cat's are the devil incarnate, there's a good reason witches use them as mediums, yada yada yada... Here's where it gets wierd: I think she's possessed by our dead dog.
Hoover was a perfectly nice springer spaniel with some very particular eccentricities. For instance, when he wanted to come in the house he didn't just come to the back door and bark. That was too confusing for him. When we first got him, our back door came in through a screen porch. He would bark at the door and if no one came, he would run to the picnic table in the middle of the back yard and jump up on it. From up there, he could see through the porch to the kitchen and bark at anyone in the house. A few years later we remodeled the back of the house and moved the back door. Didn't matter, he still ran to the corner where the door used to be, (which by then was a window), and bark. Then he'd go jump on the picnic table. Eventually we built a deck across the back of the house and moved the picnic table to the back of the yard. Didn't matter. By then he was too old and set in his ways to change. If he wanted to come in the house, he'd amble to the far corner of the yard, climb up onto the picnic table and bark, looking like Simba on Pride Rock. If we'd had a bigger yard, he'd have frozen to death before we ever knew he wanted in.
I swear that dog could tell time. If it got to be 7:30 in the morning and no one had fed him yet, he'd come sit outside our bedroom door and moan and sigh until we got up.
We got this cat, Anibel, about a year before Hoover died.
We'd had a different cat, Phoebe, who was great with mice but not so good with power lines. This is the first summer since she died that you couldn't see the charred outline of her carcass on the back sidewalk. Man, she was a great cat. She loved Hoover. She thought he was a retarded cat who couldn't kill his own food, but she loved him anyway.
Anibel is a good cat, too. She's not as friendly as Pheobe had been and not as ruthless a hunter, either. She liked Hoover just fine, but he died two years ago.
Lately, she's been starting to act like him.
She follows me around the house like he used to do. That's not all that unusual. Pets get used to being social and they like to be where the people are. It's far more normal for dogs, but I guess Anibel's not the first cat to insist on following her person all over the house. All day. Every day.
She flops down on her back in front of me whenever she wants my attention. That's very catlike, but lately she's begun to lay across my feet whenever I sit down, or under my feet if I put them up, just like Hoover used to do. It's only annoying when I don't know she's there and I trip on her when I stand up. I used to trip over
Hoover four or five times a day.
This summer, she began sitting outside our bedroom door early in the morning, waiting for us to get up and feed her. At 7:30 she stops waiting and starts banging on the door. We've had to take to locking it because she can actually open it. Hoover never did that.
Anibel likes to be outside. When she wants to come in she goes to any window through which she can hear people or see a light, and launches herself at the screen, where she hangs like a live garfield doll with suction feet. I really hate it if someone lets her out late at night. If she's not in the house when I go to bed, she invariably wakes me up around 3:00 am, hurling herself at my bedroom window. In the morning, I like to have my coffee on the back porch. She used to jump on the screen to get my attention back there. I always yelled at her. All the screens on the porch are bent and have rips from the weight of her hanging on them.
A few weeks ago, I heard banging on the window and turned around and there she was. But she wasn't attached to the screen, she was sitting on a table that happens to be outside the window.
Ever since then, if she wants to come in, instead of attaching herself to the screens, she just climbs up on the table and stares in the windows until someone sees her.
It's creeping me out.
