~Our first meeting took place on the front porch in the cold, obsidian black of a starless, moonless, November night. The one and only outside light bulb was broken, as well, and I had charged, screaming like a drunken banshee, out the front door, without a flashlight. Because of this total absence of any light, I had no clue as to who, or what, I was chasing with my ever present spray bottle of minty fresh, all natural, insect repellent, guaranteed, according to the internet, (“Must be true, right?”), to get rid of several kinds of problem bugs. (I’m not sure if the black widow under my sink finally packed up and left because of the actual efficacy of lemon and mint spray, or if she was just sick and tired of being water boarded twice a day). Of course,I realized this was no hunting expedition to eradicate mere bugs. From the sounds of it, a hundred of the five hundred or so feral cats living around the ranch were re-enacting a clawed, furry version of “Fast and Furious” on the roof, and the continual yowling, thumping, growling and shrieking while they were tearing from one end of the house to the other was a constant distraction to my panicked attempts to finish knitting Christmas gifts. At times, they would stop in their flight, mere feet above my head, and proceed, I was sure, to try and wrench the tiles from the roof! ~

~”Enough,” I thought, when total chaos slammed onto the roof above the front porch. As I ripped open the door, shouting at the top of my lungs, a HUGE mass of……something……landed  in the big Juniper bush about three feet from where I was standing. There was much shaking of greenery,  hissing, howling and caterwauling from the fur in the foliage, and yelling from me. (Thankfully, we didn’t have close neighbors!)~

~ “Damn!” I thought, as I furiously pumped minty-lemony-hopefully-might-be-effective-on-cats-too-insect repellent directly into the Juniper. “That’s either one helluva big tom, or a ball of forty or more rolled together!”  The mass of mayhem extracted itself from the bush and took off towards the trees. Satisfied that I had taken care of the problem for the night, I returned to my knitting, vowing to do a “spray run” every evening to ensure there was no encore of the rooftop bedlam. ~(to be continued)