I know, I know… two posts in a row about cats… But it takes a certain amount of energy to notice things that happen outside the home, and I haven’t had that kind of energy lately. I’ve begun to feel like a bear, all tucked up and ready to hibernate through the winter, if only I could come up with a good way to get paid for hibernating.
This last weekend, though, I set up the Christmas tree. This is the first time I’ve put together a fake tree, but it wasn’t hard, and the result isn’t so bad. It’s sort of like those plastic renditions of meals that Japanese restaurants put out to entice saliva into action before you even sit down. As long as you don’t get to close, try to smell it, or (heaven forbid) try to eat it, it’s quite beautiful. My tree even has built in flaws in the form of some browning needles, carefully placed to stave off the creepy feeling that the tree might be a little bit too perfect to be wholesome.
Well, dear Pippin decided to put the tree to the taste test (though he’s done nothing like these crazy cats). He just won’t stay away from it, and I’m enough of a worrier that I have visions of walking out of the room and returning to find that he’s chewed through a cord and electrocuted himself, or to plug the tree in at night only to find that he chewed through a cord during the day and now the two frayed ends of cord are just waiting for a current to induce them to shower the room with sparks, set the place on fire, and require that I rig up some ingenious rope system to get people, cat, and social security cards safely out of a third-floor window.
My solution? Each night I unplug the tree before bed and then shroud it in a sheet, carefully tucking in the edges so that Pippin won’t find a glorious tree cave where he can sit and gnaw through the night without fear of discovery.
This seems to work quite well, but it does leave me with the prospect of waking up to a hulking, colorless, smell-less form in my living room each morning, and passing by it’s rustling formlessness at night, in the dark, after checking on the state of the front door lock.
So my shrouded tree hulks in the corner through the night and the day while nobody is home. It only gets released for those few hours of blessed freedom in the evenings while watchful eyes and trigger fingers on squirt bottles can keep Pippin from gorging himself on those perfect plastic boughs.