Rhapsody in Orange

Dear ones, forgive the hiatus! The best-laid plans of mice and bloggers often go awry. I have been kept from my post (or rather, posts) by the flu's nasty older brother and a case of ulcerative keratitis (if you're curious, click here). One morning, as I walked down the street to the bank trying to shield my eyes from sunlight and staggering not a little bit, I had a good feverish laugh at the realization that I looked like I have a boyfriend named Thug the Killa. But enough of such unpleasantries . . .

Great love affairs draw appeal from the forbidden, where love "springs from our only hate." Think of the Capulets and the Montagues. Tristan and Iseult. Diabetics and sugar.

So it is with me and cats. My attraction may have been innate (I pretended to be a cat until an embarassing age), but I was raised to believe that cats were nasty creatures, scratching, aloof little blighters who lived to destroy your draperies and heave up unseemly hairballs. My grandfather, armed with a crossbow, once spent a night of murderous insomnolence lying in ambush for a neighborhood tom, but that is a story for another blog.

But then I met Honeydew, a cat of cats who moved into my apartment when I was otherwise quite alone. Her name is direct and to the point: she is as fat and sweet and orange as a melon, and "Cantaloupe" was too hard to say. She came declawed and never leaves the apartment. She spends 23.5 hours a day sleeping wherever the sun is pouring through the windows; and although she never seems to move, she follows the patches of sunlight wherever they go. She doesn't have a discernible muscle or bone in her body. She purrs perpetually. Petting her is like massaging a whiskered pillow with an internal combustion engine. Rhapsody in orange.

Egad - I have become a single woman in love with her cat.