Smokey and the Screen Door

Until she outgrew it,  my baby sister slept in a lovely little wooden cradle.   One morning my mother found our cat curled up in the cradle next to the sleeping baby.

Not an animal lover herself,  my mother had tolerated pets in the house for our sake.  (See  The Puppy in the Waiting Room and Fluffy and the Alligator Shoes).

But a cat in the cradle was too much for her.   Although I never knew her to be superstitious,   she evoked the old wives tale about cats who smell milk on babies breathe and smother them,  and she banned the cat from the baby’s room.

Years later when our son Noah was born,   my mother implored us to keep our cat Smokey out of the baby’s room at night.   To placate her we promised we’d keep the door closed.

But the baby asleep behind a closed door was intolerable to me,  and so I asked our super to install a screen door on Noah’s room.  That way we could keep the cat out of the room while we could look in.

Then one morning I realized Smokey hadn’t slept on our bed that night as he usually did.   Nor was he in the kitchen circling his bowl and meowing for breakfast.

I walked down the hall and looked through the screen door.   In the crib was the sleeping baby,  and curled up on the floor under the crib – the sleeping cat.  Apparently the night before we’d locked Smokey in Noah’s room instead of out.

Needless to say,  we didn’t tell my mother.

– Dana Susan Lehrman

Dana Susan Lehrman
This retired librarian loves big city bustle and cozy country weekends, friends and family, good books and theatre, movies and jazz, travel, tennis, Yankee baseball, and writing about life as she sees it on her blog World Thru Brown Eyes!
www.WorldThruBrownEyes.com

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