The expert on fall weather (Aug. 21)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Mrs. Doud and I both think autumn is almost here, even though by the calendar fall is still a month away. The way we know is that the cat is starting to fluff out and put on her winter coat.
It’s a little like when you go to the big city, and while walking around the stores you notice the better-dressed women are consulting salespeople about fall fashions. Who better than clothes-buying city women to predict weather change? Well, there’s the cat.
The cat hasn’t been well dressed at all this summer. All she has done is shed. The garage, which doubles as her house, is carpeted wall to wall with cat hair. There’s barely room for the cars. I sometimes go out with a vacuum and clean it up a little, and for a day or two it looks pretty good. Then it carpets up again.
One day I went after the loose cat hair with a yard blower. About all that happened was that the cat hair on one side went over to the other side, and vice versa. It took about an hour for all the floating cat hair to settle down, and it took the rest of the day before the cat came back. When the blower started, she bolted about three blocks down the street. When she returned, she first peeked around the corner of the garage door to see whether that monster had left.
But she has stopped shedding, almost suddenly. Instead of looking mangy and decrepit, she now is sleek, combed and clean, almost like one of those cats in cat-food commercials.
By the way, have you noticed how those cat-food-commercial cats always look sleek and thin? It’s no wonder you see them dive into a bowl of cat food when they get the cue. I think they’re starved. And then they have cat barbers trim them up.
When I see those cats eating, I think to myself that if I fed our cat some of that cat food she might stop looking like a duffle bag with four little legs. But that never works. She just chunks up more. Pretty soon, we’ll have to start moving her around with a forklift.
