I was making my very best effort at doing something off line, you know - being productive - and it went sideways on me. Typically I’m just your average, happy-go-lucky gal, blissfully tending my backyard disaster, when today life decides to toss me into chaos. My four cats – Karen, Remus, Suede, and Velvet – are the self-appointed guardians of my garden and property, patrolling for those dastardly skyworms (that’s butterflies to the uninitiated) and any vermin bold enough to trespass. Karen and Remus, my tabby terrors, strut with the swagger of seasoned bouncers, while Suede and Velvet, mottled grey-and-white fluffballs, look like they stumbled out of a muted Jackson Pollock painting. Picture a sun-dappled morning, the kind that makes you hum show tunes while sipping coffee. I’m 50, menopausal, and my face is a personal volcano ready to erupt with hot flashes, so I’m out early to pluck raspberries before the sun turns my backyard into a sauna. My garden spans 75x60 consisting of some ground space and eight raised beds each 12 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 3 feet high, bursting with greenery. My cats, though? They think it’s their personal jungle gym. Karen, the tabby tyrant, has earned her name through sheer feline audacity. She patrols like she’s auditioning for Jurassic Park, using my hunched-over back as a springboard – SURPRISE! BOING! – like she’s gunning for a gold medal in feline acrobatics. Her first victim? My poor vinyl pool, a 15-foot-diameter, 4-foot-deep prairie oasis with an inflatable top ring. Karen decided that ring was her launchpad to leap onto a pool floatie my daughter leaves out for wayward bees or birds. Her claw-tastic takeoffs have turned that pool into an aquatic colander, leaking like it’s sobbing for its lost dignity. Next year, we’re putting up a better one, because this one’s heading for the pool graveyard. But Karen’s not done with me yet – not by a long shot. Yesterday, she turned my yard into her personal trophy room. First, she drops skyworms at my feet – butterflies and moths, which she despises because I believe she thinks they're chasing her. Karen’s like, “I’m the hunter, not the hunted, you winged freaks!” Then she saunters up with a vole, dangling limp from her jaws like a sad little sock. I holler, “Karen, drop it!” She does, and that vole rockets to my shed like it’s got a date with Usain Bolt, straight to where Remus, my other furry assassin, lurks. But the pièce de résistance? She brings me a prairie dog. A PRAIRIE DOG! Now, I’m a bleeding heart – every critter deserves its shot at life. That prairie dog didn’t choose to be a prairie dog; it’s just out there living its best burrowing life. So I save it, and Karen shoots me a look like I’ve just burned her catnip stash. That was yesterday... Fast forward to this glorious morning. I’m skipping through my garden, a menopausal Mary Poppins, dodging hot flashes and dreaming of raspberry pies. My ADHD brain – textbook, impervious to meds, even most antibiotics – forgets everything the second it’s out of sight. I spot Karen in a raised bed, frozen like a furry T-rex, stalking something with the intensity of a CIA operative. I chuckled, thinking, "Karen, you drama queen," and promptly forget her existence as I obsess over the possible spiders that might be lurking in my raspberry bushes. Spiders are my personal apocalypse, folks. I forget they exist until I see either a spuder web or a spider. Then its every man for themselves if for any individual between me and what my panicked mind perceives as safety. So I’m plucking raspberries, my inner narrator muttering about wet grass soaking my Dawgs sandals – yuck, that unexpected wet feeling - when a sound rips through the air, like a demon gargling broken glass. I whipped my head left, and there’s Karen, perched on a pine bough, about a foot away from my nose, with the MOTHER OF ALL SPIDERS clamped in her jaws. Its legs are protruding from her mouth like it’s auditioning for a horror flick. My ADHD brain doesn’t see a spider – it sees a writhing, tentacled nightmare straight out of Alien vs. Predator. Then, in a moment that’ll haunt my nightmares, Karen SPITS IT OUT. AT ME. The beast falls from the bough, tumbling end over end like a fuzzy bowling ball of doom, rolling straight at me. Cue the five alarm-level chaos. My scream could shatter windows as I bolt, arms windmilling like I’m trying to take flight. I fleetingly noticed my neighbours, two 80-something sweethearts sipping coffee on their porch, are looking on in wide-eyed bewilderment and surprise – getting the show of a lifetime! They’ve joked with me before, “We canceled cable after you moved in!” They’re the ones who snitched on Karen using my pool as her launchpad, helping me solve the mystery of why the inflatable ring was deflating faster than my hopes for a quiet morning. Karen, thinking she’s my furry savior, chases after me, bell jingling like a horror movie soundtrack. I’m sprinting – or at least I was trying to – from a cold start, but here’s the kicker: Karen’s latest stunt prior to my backyard appearance was trying to tackle a crow mid-air, using the pool’s ring as her springboard, only to find no floatie to land on. Her claws had tore a gash, and now the pool’s draining like it’s auditioning for Niagara Falls. Well my sandals hit that sopping grass and pool water, and – BOOM! –my feet flew out like I was in a Looney Tunes cartoon, legs churning in mid-air, face contorted in a rubbery scream, eyes bugging out like ping-pong balls. I’m a 50-year-old menopausal woman, clutching a mostly empty raspberry pail, involuntarily attempting a one-handed cartwheel that’s more like a drunken barrel roll. My body remembers gymnastics from 30 years ago, but my brain’s like, “ABORT MISSION! DON'T PUT YOUR ASS OVER YOUR HEAD!" I tumble, flailing, into the grass, hydroplaning about 8 feet on a slick of pool water and dew – think Slip ‘N Slide meets Wipeout. My leg’s searing from knee to hip like I’ve been branded, my eyes are burning from bug spray surfing rivulets of sweat into them, and I’m plastered with bits of grass, clover, some raspberry juice, dirt, part of a dragon fly – eww gross – and grass stains ON MY SKIN! The raspberries? Most if them lost among the blades of grass and clover. Gasping, I’m flat on my back, my shirt is almost over my head, I'm unable to see past my own heaving chest, when that dreaded jingle of a solitary collar-bell approaches. Karen looms over me, and – sweet mercy – she’s got that "spider" in her mouth again. I started thrashing like I’m possessed, elbows dragging me backward, legs kicking like I’m fending off a Pygmy T-Rex, when, through the fog of panic, I see it: it’s not a spider. It’s what's left of a blasted plastic pot scrubber my husband left out after cleaning some tools and lawn furniture last weekend when I was experiencing the Saturday from hell with out of town company. Karen’s been parading it like it’s her Oscar for Best Dramatic Feline.🏆 My neighbors are now hovering nearby, coffee cups in hand, faces torn between concern and hysterics. The old guy wheezes, “I thought you were battlin’ the devil hisself with all that screamin’!” His wife, wiping tears of laughter, says, “I haven't seen anybody that flexible at 50! Did that hurt?” I’m lying there, soaked, filthy, and mortified, explaining how I mistook a pot scrubber for a soul-stealing spider and Karen’s waging war on me for saving the critters she keeps catching. They're getting every last bang for their buck declaring how interesting they find me and how they probably have to up their stock of leak guard underwear. Ten seconds of sheer terror felt like a lifetime and my neighbours are barely restraining themselves from asking for an encore. Such is life at my house. ❤️ 🐈
(Pics in order 1) Pool is toast now. 2) Karen's view of the raspberries from the pine. 3) Karen's and her baling twine ball. 4) Karen's chasing me down to guard me from every possible threat.
