The main thing, of course, is the garden. The boys went out the first morning we were here—the night before we moved they spent with my friend Jenny, who lives not far from us in South Windsor, and her two boys, Fatty and—eep! I forget. Friendly boys, though, and very happy to have overnight guests, which is both kind and handy.
Our first night at the house, the boys did what cats do—sniffed around, jumped up on things (boxes and anything with a vantage point to a window), checked out the fireplace (not lit!), and then cuddled up very cosily to me on the sofa bed in the living room (didn't set the bedroom up for a day or two).
People are always full of advice when you move house with cats, most of it unnecessary in my experience. There's this idea that cats are prone to wander off, to try and find their old home, but I've never actually known a cat to do that. Maybe a cat who has been more attached to their territory than their people, but that's a cat who isn't really loved, or made welcome inside, or fed regularly, I would hazard a guess. I had not concerns at all about moving Cooper and Louis. I moved Bridie several times in her life and as a family we moved our cats easily (church families and their cats must needs be adaptable!) and I knew my lovely boys would be just fine. Better than fine, once they saw their enormous 890 square metres of garden. And so it came to pass...
I kept the boys inside for a few hours in the morning so they got used to the house in daylight (they didn't arrive here until after dark our first night, due to the Great Removalist Too-Small-Truck incident of moving day), and then let them out when my sister Alison arrived to help me unpack. By then they were breaking their necks to get out, and so out they went and, as expected, they were right as rain and happy as pigs in mud—or happy as two cabin-crazy, flat-bound cats in their own House and Garden.
The house came ready with a catflap, although to be fair, it was a doggy door until the previous owners moved out and we moved in. Back when Bridie was a kitten, my ex made a little timber cat door for her, custom-made for the glass-paned sliding door on the bedsit I lived in (I'm sure I must have a photo somewhere). I remember he and I sat on either side of the door with treats (kitteh biscuits I think), tempting her through until she got the hang of it, which she did pretty quickly. She was always from the happy to push through the flap (and remember, it was timber) to get in and out, even if it caught her tail a little.
Well, Bridie, sitting up on your little fur-line cloud on kitteh heaven, have a word in the boys' ears, would you? Because they will not go through the cat door unless the flap is propped open. Well, Louis will, at a pinch, but Cooper—absolutely not. I don't know if it offends his dignity, or merely hurts his tail (which is, it must be said, magnificent), but he will not (unless pushed forcibly by, well, moi) go through the catflap in down position. He jumps whenever it swings down on his tail. And given now there's only me and not me and someone else with opposable thumbs, I can't really train the boys to use the flap by kitteh biscuit temptage. So every morning I slide out the plastic locking bit and prop open the flappy bit and off they go, in-and-out-the-garden to their hearts' content—unless the wind comes and blows it shut. And then, be they in or be they out, they're stuck where they are.
They're usually out.
My, how they love the garden. They love the lizards to chase and the birds to stalk (only one corpse to date, and while it's true that Louis did defile it most shamefully, there is No Actual Evidence that either boy was responsible for its demise. And it was only a miner. I think). They have trees and fences (brick and timber) to climb, dandelions and something that looks like cattail grass (but isn't, I don't think) to ever-so-bwavely pounce upon, lavender bushes to sneak around in (see above: bird-stalking) and therefore smell delicious from... I'd better stop there before I lose total control of my syntax. (But seriously, I don't think anything smells more delicious than a cat who has been hanging around in the lavender.)
Also—interesting point. Neither of them have shown any evidence of fleas since we moved here, despite the outrageous lengths my grass got to after the recent (and ongoing) rains. Curiouser and curiouser.
And they have neighbours. And vast tracts of empty land across the road which is, apparently, full of rats and rabbits (and frogs—you can hear them at night when walking home from one of your pleasant new social engagements in town). Cooper was, as far as I can tell, the first to make the Great Mileham Street Crossing into the RSL land across from us. It were very brave of him, but I think he was very pleased to have an excuse to dash home when I took off after him, trying to convince him to come back (while keeping an anxious eye out for cars).
Louis, of course, was watching every move, and soon enough headed over himself to check things out. It was also Louis who decided that those large black tubey things (sewer pipes which were, I kid you not, dozens and dozens of metres long) needed to be checked out from the inside. (And therefore made me embarrass myself by asking the nice Irish foreman to please make sure that they didn't lay the pipes with my little Louis inside.)
I don't know quite how far and wide they have roamed in terms of THIS side of the road, where Actual People live, but I know that the woman two doors up (whose name escapes me but has 2 cats and 2 dogs) wrongly assumed that they weren't desexed because they "wandered". (Wandered? Two houses away? Please! Call that wandering...?) I also know they like hanging about next door in Herbie and Marion's house, not only because I have seen them heading through and over the fence, but because Herbie told me that yes, yes, the boys had been in his yard, lying in the pansies, poohing in the garden... Oh dear, so much for neighbourly relations.
I've also discovered Louis in the back laneway—not sure how far he's gone, or if he's just popped out when he's heard the car, but it's another "boundary" he's broken, my Nine Lives Louis.
I am still sorting out the best way to deal with the times I am away from home until after dark, because we (my family) has always kept our cats in at night, even when it wasn't environmentally the done thing to do. I have found a local-ish woman, Maureen, who does in-home pet care, very useful when I had a residential conference to go to in eastern Sydney recently, but a bit expensive for everyday I'm-going-to-be-home-late events. (I found out about Maureen, incidentally, when I had Louis at the vet because he got stung by a bee under his chinny-chin-chin.) I'm intending to find a local kid/teen who will put them in for pocket money, but in the meantime, there are nights when they boys get to play after dark...
Like tonight.
Tonight I took my mum and dad out to their local club for Thursday Night Steak Night, and by the time I was driving home (after dark) it was raining AGAIN. (We've had a lot of rain lately—kind of nice when you're snug inside at home, not so much fun on the roads at night.) When I got out of the car to open the gates, I thought I could hear a cat crying, but it was wet and a bit windy and hard to be sure. I couldn't see the boys when I drove in, although Louis dashed across the yard soon after, and then I heard the unmistakable bleating of a cat in trouble. And I knew immediately it was Cooper, and I quickly realised that he was—apparently—stuck on the roof of the duplexes on the other side of Medlow, our house.
Oh! That plaintive cry! How distressed he sounded—and Louis dashing around on the ground (still unsure of he was excited by distress or just thrilled by the drama). Cooper, as you will recall, is largely black, and so I couldn't always actually see him as he moved up and down and across the roof. But hear him, most certainly, as he apparently called to me, his loving mother, for rescue.
So I did the only thing and dashed out the front and into next door, calling to him all the time, nearly tripping over lavender and Louis, half-worried about the neighbours but mostly (after all, the duplexes are still empty, so there aren't that many immediate neighbours) worried about Cooper. There he was, pacing the roof, crying "Save me! Save me!", and at one point looking like he was going to attempt the leap from roof to fence. I got to the highest point I could, somehow thinking he could make the leap into my arms (too many movies—have you MET this cat?), realised none of this would work, so belted back to my carport where those afore-mentioned previous owners had fortuitously left behind a ladder... so I wielded the ladder back through my side gate, around the front and into next door—only to see a newly grounded Cooper take one look at me and my ladder and disappear into the access hole under the house.
Silly me and my grand rescue fantasy.
So, bugger you, Cooper, she said, with the greatest of affection, as she lugged the ladder back and then let herself (and Louis) into the house—only to discover...
that the wind had blown closed the catflap.
And Cooper waiting at the back door.
Home, sweet home.
We are the happiest cats in Sydney.
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