Arrival

Well, they are here.  My mother-in-law and her small, jet black cat named Molly.  There is no photographic evidence of Molly for this blog post.  She has made herself generally scarce except in the confines of her new room, where she cuddles with her human, and has no use for the rest of us: those nasty humans who smell of dog and have this evil other cat.

Nothing says welcome like sleeping on your laundry
so you'll have my cat dander all over it

Speaking of that other cat, Tum Tum is of the opinion that this is all a great game put on for her benefit.  She is just loving it:  boxes to lay obtrusively on top of, packing paper to curl up and sleep on, and above all else, another creature to torture into submission.  And, this one's actually smaller than her!  Bonus!  I was a little worried about how she'd react to a new cat, but it was clear immediately she was not only fine, but better than fine.  She may have met her match in Molly who, for such a small thing, can emit a loud, baritone growl and clearly has no intent to submit to Tum Tum's Cersei-like ways, but she's loving the challenge.

Of course many of you want to know how Molly's human is doing.  Hard to say if she's just being brave or she's truly adjusting well, but when you consider what she's being asked to do: give up her own home in the town where she's lived longer than I've been alive and move to a strange place (yes, Pittsburgh, for Texans, you are like a foreign country) in another woman's house surrounded by another's things, then I'd say she's doing very well.  She is frail.  She is very different than the dynamic ball of energy I first met many decades ago now.  She's fragile in many ways.  But she's facing the inevitable that we all will face - if we're lucky - of growing older with a resilience that is enviable. 

But that said, she did come in tow with a whole lot of possessions.  A lifetime's worth of them.  Many of them heirloom pieces that belonged to her family or her husband's.  I've spent hour after hour polishing silver that I have no idea what I can possibly do with once I'm done, but I can't stand to see a tarnished piece of silver.  My fingernails are black with tarnish and I've polished off (pun intended) two jars of silver cream, and I'm still not done.  I'm trying to actually find a use or a place to display as much of her things as I can.  But I am the caretaker of my own lifetime's worth of things, plus what I inherited from my family so the delicate dance of respecting everyone's heritage is on-going.  Over the past week, my one constant thought has been "Man, I wish I hadn't gone to all those estate sales."  (I have a passion for estate sales).  So, what did I do yesterday?  Went to an estate sale.  But in fairness, we were looking at furniture for my daughter.

My husband took the week off and has worked diligently to help unpack boxes, hang clothes, put away shoes, yarn, knick knacks, photographs and old letters, books, CD's, all the things a person collects over a lifetime.  He's even taken his mother to a doctor's appointment, but he'll go back to work tomorrow and that might be where the real rubber hits the road - when we have to balance the needs of someone who does need consistent, if not constant, attention with full time jobs.

Where does that leave the dogs?  Well, between the start of hockey season, work and a mountain of silver, I haven't seen as much of them as I usually do.  They spent the week following the other humans around watching to see what came out of all those boxes.  (You never know, there might be treats or toys, right?)  They barely know Molly is there, which is just fine.  She did wander out one time, but I think Tum Tum dispatched her back quickly and they never caught wind of her.  And, past that, someone moving in is no cause for concern for them.  As long as it doesn't seem like anyone else is moving out, they seem just fine.  Like literally all the stress of the past few weeks never happened.   They've also adjusted well to having someone who depends wholly upon a walker to get around - of course, she visited last year, so they got practice then.  I worried that they'd rush the door when she tries to go outside, which she does a few times a day to smoke (she'd quit last year, but somewhere along the way of the past year took it back up), but they instinctively don't.  They do want to go out when she does, but are very cautious about walking around her.  No one taught them that.  They just seem to know.

And how is she with them?  Well, depends upon the day and what they're up to.  Like children.  Last night at dinner - with Rooney and Geddy laying nearby just in case something fell their way, and Sirius actually pressing the issue and staring at the table in a way I doubt any dog trainer in the world would approve of, she announced that they "are so well behaved."  I had to laugh, thinking back to the debacle at obedience class just a couple of weeks before. But, you know what, they are pretty darn good dogs.