Catastrophe

Imagine a silent house at 5 a.m. Two humans and a cat snooze deeply on a bed, a rabbit behind the couch. Suddenly the cat and rabbit perk up: a small flapping sound, and Bijou realizes someone is in the house eating my food! She carefully sneaks up on the intruder and

RRRREAAAAAOOOOWWW! All hell breaks lose! I leap out of bed naked and blind like a mole-rat. Running through the living room into the kitchen I have a series of rapid thoughts: Is a large scary raccoon beating up Bijou? Is someone murdering our bun? I make it to the dark kitchen I see a large fuzzy object pelting around along with much crashing and hissing. I step on a wet floor covered with some sort of grit. I scream. I still think it's a raccoon, but I don't know who's getting the short end of the stick. Michael makes it to the kitchen and throws on the lights, and we see this:
Plus a very small grey cat. No murdering raccoon. A little kitty. Bijou (the large fuzzy object) has gone under the bed, and Jo-Jo is still behind the couch being very, very still. The floor, refrigerator, and nearby walls are covered with cold tea and coffee grounds.

As the lights go on and the kitty sees us, she tries to leap onto the counter above the garbage can, dislodging more dishes. I crouch down to try to calm her, and she doesn't seem scared of me, at first. Michael says "open the door and get her out!" As I move towards her to open the door, she leaps on to a nearby kitchen chair, and then leaps up the wall! She manages to damage a spice rack as she slides back down to the floor, and finally vanishes out the cat door.

We stand there stunned. Did that cat just try to climb the wall? What the hell? Why didn't she just leave? Why did she wreak such disaster and mayhem on our kitchen? We'll never know, but one thing's for sure, she was a spry one!

It took us until 5:40am to finish cleaning up, reassuring our girls, and getting back to bed. By the time we all got back in bed, Bijou planted herself firmly on me, purring. And we slowly went back to sleep ....

The next morning after cleaning up, I sat down at the kitchen table to read with my breakfast. My current book, The egyptologist, was lying open. It had gotten splashed and was a little warped and dirty with cat hair stuck to it. As I started to read where I had left off, just under a cat hair, I read "Up early, hours before the bank will open, and I find ... Cats!" How freaky is that? The book hasn't once mentioned cats before now.