The View from Here

When I come up to bed at night, Shiva is often by the hearth, enjoying the residual heat from the downstairs fireplace below. In the middle of the night, however, she sits and stares at the fireplace, still and silent as a stone gargoyle, waiting in hopes that the squirrel family who has built a nest up in the chimney will make an appearance…the same squirrel family that my sweet husband did not want to evict during the cold weather, and I agreed in an effort to keep him off of the roof. What I do for love…

Last night around 3am I heard Shiva chasing something around the hearth and I began to get increasingly nervous, debating whether to wake Dan up for help. Shiva then appeared to catch something, looked at me in the dimly lit room, ran straight for me, and jumped on my chest. My heart stopped as I recoiled, waiting for a baby squirrel- or worse- to be deposited on top of me in some bizarre cat gifting ritual. (Either that or like in The Godfather when the mafia left a horse’s head in someone’s bed). Thankfully, it was just Shiva and her warm and fuzzy self, looking me in the eyes with her unblinking stare, her purring sounding like static electricity.

Sleep was elusive for the remainder of the night, to put it mildly. I swear this cat will be the death of me.