The kitties–Rusty and Nipper–and I tried to go for a walk the other day–not a real big success in any terms that I might use in a family paper.
See, I had been taking them, intermittently, to yoga on Saturday mornings, not when it was too cold for any of us to be out, not when it was so miserable wet that we’d all have to be in rain garb, just when I could get both of them in a carrier to make the short trek up to the Y. Well, time going on, as it does, they put on a little weight (Don’t we all?) and I got tired of lugging them the whole half-block and the little dickenses got to knocking over fake potted plants and dropping toys into holes in the floor, never to be seen again in the yoga room and they got too interested in people’s toes or whatever. So they stayed home more often than not.
My helpful neighbor across the street found me an abandoned plastic wagon to deal with the transportation–cats-in-carrier-in-wagon–but rain on any given Saturday (Have we had a few of those?) made that problematic, so they just stayed home until I got a Brain Flash :Let’s get them each a little harness and a leash then we’ll go walking up there; no problem. What could go wrong?
Well, finding a harness small enough, for starters.
These little furballs will not fit in something made for a Maine Coon. Nor, as it turns out, do they want to. “Walk time” must be extended by the length of time it takes to get them in their respective harnesses and attach the leash to each frantic feline. Then, those very same cats which had been hanging around the doors hoping to make an escape while I was distracted, now were reluctant to set a paw out in the cold, cruel world while the door was wide open. Picking them up got us out onto the porch where there were amazing things to sniff and play with (It was right around the yard sale and trash pick-up weekend which I had not yet recovered from), going any further afield didn’t look to be in the cards.
Considerably later we had got down off the porch but the likelihood of walking up to the Y was looking sorta distant. Neither of them wanted to ride in the wagon without more comfortable accommodations, so I picked them up–no easy feat, two at a time and carried them a little bit at a time, stopping every so often to run up trees (Them, not me), inspect clumps of grass, pendant raindrops, ancient Halloween wrappers, gravel. So we get there and I, having missed the memo, but noticing that there were no cars in the parking area, discovered that the Y was not open. We took a brief gander at the duckies on the flower garden box in front then turned to go home.
Same story in reverse.
I may have to rethink this.
