They're Teenagers

Husband and I don't sit out on the deck much, even though this particular deck took almost exactly the same amount of time to construct as one of the great cathedrals of Europe, which is to say several hundred years. (I jest. It was really only four years or so that the first step out of the sunroom into the backyard was eight feet off the ground. It just seemed like several hundred years.)

Anyway, the reason we don't sit out there isn't because we don't love the deck. Who wouldn't love it, with its rain-dappled cedar rails and shade trees?

We don't sit out there because Our Dog Pepper is no longer with us. And while we miss Our Dog Pepper in general, the thing we miss the most is that she is no longer there to make friends with the neighborhood's stray cats. She was so anxious to play with those critters that they almost never ventured past the back gate, much less up onto the deck.

Now, though, every time we look out the back door there are cats sitting in our deck chairs. I wouldn't mind this except that if one sits in a deck chair that has been recently inhabited by the cats, one gets back up with one's fanny covered in a veritable cat-skin rug of shed hair. (Also, you will not regret clicking on the link in the previous sentence. At least I didn't.)

I don't know how old the cats are but I'm pretty sure they're in that one year between childhood and teenage years in which the tween is intolerable, the year in which you would like to give your child away because he could not possibly be the result of any nature or nurture you approved but who would take him?

You know the stage, right? When your previously loving babykins, the one who could be brought to contrition with only  a sorrowful look and the words, "Oh, Boy!," suddenly stares back at you and said "Yeah? What?" And that stage only lasted a year but holy cow, you were ready for him to GET OVER IT ALREADY?

The cats that were in the deck chairs nanoseconds before I took the shot above turned camera-shy and shot off the deck when I opened the door but they gave me this look from the landing at the bottom of the deck steps.

Yeah. Definitely almost-teenagers. No wonder their parents don't claim them.