The life of a cat lady

So it's fall and the leaves are turning though the days are still a delightful low 70s and the sun is still warm. But because the temps are not extreme the colors of the turning leaves aren't as vibrant as they were up north.

Leaving school today I saw a small maple leaf on the pavement, brilliantly red.

I carefully picked it up and noticed it was fresh. Lovingly holding it all the way to the car, I placed it on the beverage cup, intending to scan it when I got home and make something online with it. Maybe change the banner photo, maybe posterize it in Photoshop and make a greeting card...something.

I zipped to the grocery store and the Dollar Store to buy the week's stuff. Boy, milk went up thirty cents. That was a huge disappointment. A half gallon is $2.99 now.

Anyway, I got the food and drove home. I was worried that the heat inside the car had curled my leaf. It hadn't.

I got to the door holding all my groceries, with the leaf's stem in my mouth and the keys dangling from my pinkie. As I set the groceries down by the door I noticed a stream on small red ants traveling at full speed to the threshold and disappearing en masse inside the wall. Uh-oh. Visions of empires of fire ants building continent-sized cities inside my wall was too much to bear, so I jammed the keys in the lock, threw open the door and set all the bags down on the kitchen floor, while carefully laying the leaf down on the bookcase next to the door.

I grabbed the ant spray and used a third of a bottle spraying the ant line, the doorstep, and the walkway.

Then I put away the groceries, got dinner on the stove, and sat down to attend to email.

It was a hour later when I finished emails and replying to comments from the other blog, when I got ready to have some art fun and scan my leaf. I looked around. No leaf.

Hm. I know I brought it inside. I looked at the red rug on the kitchen, thinking the leaf had fluttered off in the frenzy to spray the ants. Was it on the rug, camouflaged but otherwise untouched? Nope. I looked at the bookcase and behind the bookcase. No leaf.

Uh-oh. Cat. The cat must have gotten it.

I went into the bedroom and saw the two of them curled up there on the bed in the waning sun patch. And on the rug next to the bed was a regurgitated leaf. My nice rug. My formerly nice leaf.

Such is life of an old cat lady. Apparently unbeknownst to me, what I had really been doing when I had cradled, shepherded and delivered a snippet of the outdoors, was not to scan and make art for myself, but to give a taste of the outdoors to my cat.