Down from the Attic: Must All Things be New?

by Mewsette

In Spring, all things are new. Well, not all things, thank goodness, but just enough to make it nice. New leaves on the trees, new little blades of grass, new baby birds in nests - oh, yes! But that's outside. We expect the outside world to get all new in the Spring; it's supposed to. But that is not true of inside our house!

New things happen even when we don't want them to. I don't know if many cats are like me, not liking things that are new or different. All I know for sure is that I don't. If our humans listened to us, they wouldn't try out new designer cat litters on us, or move our purrsonal stuff where we didn't leave it, or bring big, hulky new furniture in the house. Since the first two didn't get done to me and the last one did, it's the worst. Let me tell you what happened to us!

First of all, our old couch is my sisfur Phelicity's work of art. She completely redesigned the upholstery over her whole life. They are both 12 years old. She grew up with that couch and she considers it her masterpiece. One end of it belongs to me, though, and I spent about 23 1/2 hours a day there. So when these big men came in and hauled it down to my den, we were not happy. But the worst was yet to come.

Then they dragged a new couch in here! The wrong color, the wrong material, the wrong height, and the wrong smells. New things do not smell nice to us cats. They smell ... well, ..new. Our scent isn't on it. Of course we know that could be fixed in a hurry. My mom is lucky she lives with girl cats, let me tell you! But they weren't done yet.

They dragged in a chunky, hulking monster they had the nerve to call a chair! I know purrfectly well what chairs are; we've got them all over. That wasn't a chair. It was a boulder. When the door got closed and my sisfur and I got sprung from the back bedroom, we just stared in horror. One of the men sat on the boulder to write on a paper, and called me pretty. I think I hissed at him.

After they left, Phelicity jumped up on that new couch, sat there a minute, and jumped down. She passed me on her way to the den, mewing "That thing isn't ours," and followed her nose to ours. She spent the next two days laying on the back of our old couch where she always did, except she was down in the den. Till she got lonesome and had to come deal with this.

Meanwhile, I tried to fix it. I could see Mom was terribly sad cause she didn't like the new couch, either. And since she put my old towel on my end for me, without washing my scent out, I made a heroic effort and joined her there. Two days later she made them take the boulder away and put a smaller thing there that looks more like a chair. But she didn't know Phelicity adopted the boulder while she was gone. So I hope my sisfur decides to like the not-a-boulder chair, cause I'm not getting on that! Unless she needs me to help shed all over it.

I told this horrifying tale to answer what I asked at the beginning. Must all things be new? No! No! It might be better to see if the old will do, even if you have to bring it down from the attic.