Wachizi
My cell phone’s alarm woke me up at 6.45, as it does every weekday. May 1st is a holiday in Tanzania (their equivalent of Labor Day), so I turned off the phone and rolled over, waiting for the chorus of hungry kittens that accompanies my phone alarm every morning.
It never came. Instead I heard weird yowling and hissing noises from the hallway. Opened the door to my room (they’d been kicked out in the middle of the night when Polycarp forgot my bed isn’t a litterbox, again) to find them facing each other, backs arched impossibly high, tails puffed, ears back.
Pretty freaked out, I made various noises, herded them with a broom, tried everything. Even breakfast didn’t break the hostilities. They moved around the house like ballerinas, walking on the very tips of their feet, backs so high that they were twice as tall and half as long as usual.
I gave up on trying to reconcile them and just kicked them out of my room whenever they started hissing at each other.
Six hours later, they’re now curled up together on my lap. Nothing seems to have happened to change their opinions of each other, except that they maybe got bored. I hope it doesn’t happen again! I much prefer the good-natured wrestling, barreling around the house, biting each other while napping.
Posted: May 1st, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comment from Chris
Time May 2, 2009 at 9:10 am
Yesterday my mom reported that Jinx, who decided at one point to be the upstairs-at-night cat, has realized this was a bad tactic for living in a house with empty nesters, and has opened negotiations to sleep with Aria in my parents bed on the first floor. So far this has consisted of spending several nights sitting outside their door not moving, and apparently two or three nights ago she moved to Phase II – coming into the room to visit but leaving and sitting outside when everyone settled down for sleep.
It sounds really adorable.