Tuesday, March 24, 2015

A good day and an update, part 2

Second part of the day: the sun was setting, I was back in my Brooklyn apartment, and I looked out the window, and saw a cat, padding along the chain link fence that separates all the little backyards behind the brownstones. I was about to turn away, when I saw a second cat, jump up after him. I was curious. Would they fight like the cats normally did, protecting their own territory? But no, they seemed to be heading the same way.

They jumped off the fence onto a shed roof that was perfectly in the setting rays of the sun, and started chilling... But then, another cat came along. And another. And another. Five cats, chilling in various areas of sunset. It was a particularly beautiful sunset, and a warmer day than we were used to. I watched them move around, interact, for a while. One of them went over to a covered grill to chill. One left shortly after arriving. Another kept moving up to a higher bit of fence, keeping a lookout.

There was a section of the shed roof that made a loud noise when they walked on it, so they walked across it awkwardly, trying to be quiet, or giving up and just being loud when that failed. Another cat, a bright orange one, came along, walking across my field of vision from one side to the other, across the hangout posse, and all the other cats heads swiveled to follow it, just like me, as it struggled to stay on the fence. It seemed to have really poor balance for a cat, and perhaps that's why we were all five transfixed on it as it navigated perilously through barbed wire, razor wire, wide wooden fences, narrow steel fences, and into yards when it could.

I eventually went off to do some work for school, and when I came back, the sun had mostly set, and there were just two cats left, a big one squatting on the very corner of the shed roof, and a really small one, on the fence, as close to the shed and the squatting cat as it could get without being on the shed roof itself. Staring. Staring at the squatting cat. Who periodically shifted its front feet. What was going on? Choose your own story. I had a million and none. In any case, it was delightful.

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