Beware the fearsome watermelon!

Today was a normal Saturday. We are into a weekly routine where our Target run is on Friday and on Saturday we go to breakfast at Waffle House and then go to Lowe’s to see if there are any bargains out. This week we found nothing at Lowe’s, but did get two solid wood chairs at Target for $17 a piece. After Lowe’s we go grocery shopping.

Last week I got a watermelon at Winn Dixie and have “drunk a glass of watermelon’ with Penny when she has tea. It is a very good watermelon, but I didn’t finish it off during the week. Hoping that this weeks melons were just as good, I bought another. There was no room in the fridge for it – I have to finish melon #1 first, so I put it out of the way in the sunroom next to the treadmill.

We have a rather skittish cat named Brie (after the cheese, but that’s another story).
I caught her as a feral kitten with a fishing net and through a complicated set of circumstances and two round trips to Gainesville she became our cat. She retains, however, that feral quality of being ever alert for danger and suspicious of change. She also is very jealous of our other cat Sunshine and will place herself between Sunshine and Me or Penny and try to keep her from getting to us.

This is what I thought she was doing when I saw her lying in the doorway to the sunroom, but she looked a little strange. I walk over to her and I see that she is staring wide-eyed at the watermelon across the room. She hadn’t seen it go in there and to her it looked like a little blimp-shaped green critter (cats do see color, right?) had snuck in on her. I went over and sat next to the melon and called Brie. She started for me then turned and scooted. She came back again when I continued to call and reassure he. She approached in a wide circle staring intently at the melon. After a lot of coaxing and patience she finally got close enough to sniff it and that seemed to help.

Later in the day I was assembling the 2 new chairs in the sunroom and Brie was helping every bit of the way. She has that cat instinct to find the place where she can interfere with what you are doing the most. I got the chairs assembled and put them against the outside wall. Now there was new territory to explore and Brie was ready to do it. As she was gauging her jump from an old chair to one of the new ones she raised up for a clear view and suddenly that watermelon came into view on the other side. All I saw was her tail as she flew from the room.

Brie has brought a lot of fun and laughter into our house. Penny and I spoil her, probably too much. I have a running joke about whether you love animals or not, but Brie came along shortly after we lost our dog and one cat. At the same time one of our outside cats, BYC, decided it was my cat. He would come and greet me whenever I was outside, raise off the ground to meet my hand when I pet him and absolutely loved to be picked up and hugged. When we returned from one of our retirement trips BYC was nowhere to be seen. Our neighbor found him dead in the schoolyard and it looked like someone had caused him a painful death. I surprised myself with my reaction to that cat’s death. I didn’t realize how attached I was. The fact that this cat that was so sweet to me probably suffered hurt a lot. So with Brie I have a sense of protecting her from that dangerous world out there. But sometimes I fail and a watermelon slips past our defenses.