An Epidemic of Feline Proportions

Sarah is the oldest of our three cats. We adopted her shortly after moving into our first apartment together; she turned twenty last June. For a cat, that’s pretty damned old.

She’s been deaf for a couple of years now, our Sarah. She’s adjusted her life accordingly. If we’re out of the house, she’ll position herself somewhere—the kitchen counter, the dining room table—where’s it’s easy for her to see the back door open on our return. In the mornings, rather than listen for our steps on the upstairs floor or the creaking of the bed, she’ll sit directly outside the bedroom door, nose to the wood, so that there’s no way she’ll miss it opening, even if she’s asleep. Sarah’s a sweet old thing, and like most old folk, she lives a life centered around eating, trying to stay warm on even the hottest of days, and napping. For the last several months she’s been napping so silently and motionlessly that I’ve gotten into the habit of poking her when I walk by and asking, “You alive? All right then,” before moving on.

I thought this week, though, was going to be her last.

Two days before we left for Connecticut, Sarah started sneezing pretty constantly. I was worried enough when we left to ask our house sitter to keep an eye on her; he would search her out when he visited, poke her to make sure she was still among the living, and then report back to us. Chloe and Fred both started sneezing the day we left. When we came back home, last Thursday, we had a full-blown kitty epidemic on our hands.

Sarah was in particularly bad shape. The sitter told us she’d eaten every day up until Wednesday night; she hadn’t eaten a thing when we got home Thursday evening, and I couldn’t get her to express any interest in food either Friday or Saturday. Her eyes were streaming, her nose was dry, and her breathing was so stressed and dire that I could hear it several rooms away. She’d stopped grooming herself, which made me unconsciously start humming the “Smelly Cat” song from Friends every time I was near. When she walked, she tottered around on weak little legs. She completely lost her voice, and would let out pathetic, silent mews that you just know were meant to communicate her weak despair. I attempted to feed her warm chicken broth to keep her strength up, but it was too difficult for her to drink.

Saddest of all, instead of sprawling in her usual sleeping spots on the sofas and chairs, she holed up in dark, concealed places where she would attempt to sleep through her death rattle. I’d been steeling myself for her demise for months—she’s an unusually old cat, after all—but I knew this was the end. I tried to make the breathing easier by putting her in the bathroom with the shower running on hot, for the steam. She responded with silent meows and by curling up to sleep in the sink.

And then she bounced back. Yesterday she was eating again. A couple of days of the steam treatment put her breathing back to normal. Her voice returned. She’s bright-eyed and vocal again, and sleeping on the chairs and cuddling up to us for comfort once more. The vet had given us antibiotics for the cat’s colds, yesterday but she scarcely seems to need it any longer. She’s gotten through, and is in the enviable state of watching the other cats suffer.

Fred isn’t happy to be sick, and doesn’t know what to make of it. She’s easy to deal with, however, because she simply does what I’d do in her situation—she crawls under some bedcovers, pulls them over her head, and sleeps all day.

Chloe, however, is miserable, and wants to world to know it. She walks around with a snot-covered nose that defies cleaning, meowing her discontent at the top of her voice and demanding I do something about it. Sometimes she’ll sit, sullen and cantankerous, glaring at us with contempt.

Today I gave them a bit of the steam treatment in the bathroom, because Chloe in particular was wheezing fairly badly. Fred hunkered on the counter and breathed the vapors like a good girl. What did Chloe do? Protest at the top of her voice the moment I closed the door, and then jumped into the half-full bathtub and began to wade around in it. Just because she is the biggest feline drama queen I’ve ever known.

All afternoon she’s been glaring at me, wet and miserable and refusing to lick herself dry. I think I’m supposed to gather from her offended and aggrieved staring that some reparation is supposed to be made.

Mostly I’m just ignoring her, and waiting for those antibiotics to kick in.

Housework

The last three weeks of my life have been something of a whirlwind. The only thing I've done, basically from sun up until I flopped into my bed at night, has been to work on getting our house in order and on the market. For the most part, that's meant doing every repair and renovation we've neglected over the entire life of the house.

The den ceiling came first. It was yikes, two years ago that we had damage from pouring rains leaking through the skylights there; it ran in little sluices down the skylight well and down the sloped ceiling toward the wall, leaving behind a large, torn pucker between the drywall and the tape between its joints. That I had to slice, remove, sand, mud, sand, mud again, prime, and paint.

The front garden, which I've always thought too large and unwieldy for a reluctant gardener—which is the best way I can describe myself—needed to be weeded for curb appeal. I mean, really weeded, not given the half-assed let's grab the knee-high ones and no one will notice the rest treatment. Then I had to do the same with the back garden, and the side gardens. I have a lot of gardens, apparently. One those were done, I had to tackle cleaning up the curious lot on the side of the garage. The previous owners used the area to store their trailers, to give an idea of its size. The current owners—that is, the Mont and I—have tended to use it as a place to store the sort of yard refuse that requires care and planning to dispose. Large branches, for example, or crumpled-up metal garbage cans. The branches had to be broken down and tied into bundles that the city would accept, and then I had to whack the weeds and miniature trees that had sprung up since the last time I'd ventured back there a couple of years ago.

The front lawn needed to be re-sodded, since it could have been used to stage a fake lunar landing. Then it needed to be watered. And watered. And watered some more, every day, and every evening.

The upstairs bathroom. Oh my god, the upstairs bathroom. Where do I even begin? When we moved into the house, on the first first day we took possession I walked upstairs into the bathroom and took in all the details I'd apparently missed during the couple of times I'd visited while house-hunting. I looked at the metallic silver wallpaper printed with fluffy clouds in an entirely different shade of metallic silver. I observed the Pepto-Bismol-pink countertop. And then I promptly broke down and wept. For a couple of years, the Mont and I laughingly called it 'The Disco Bathroom' and threatened to install a mirrorball, but in the end the only thing we could think of to do with it was to strip the wallpaper, paint everything a shade of blue that we hoped would pass as 'tropical,' and endure the astonished comments of visitors to the house who left the bathroom complaining about bleeding eyes from the countertop.

Plainly, none of this would do for selling the house.

I'd intended to re-laminate the counter myself. It didn't seem that difficult. The laminate was relatively cheap—cheaper than a completely new top, anyway—and it seemed like the kind of thing I could do without too much cursing. Attacking the counter meant removing the bathroom sink, however, and that proved impossible to do, as I found out after an hour spent with my head in a cupboard with a wrench in my hands and a flashlight between my teeth, swearing at the top of my lungs before finally I had myself a good cry. I came upon Plan C when we were visiting Home Depot for some paint for the walls. Apparently they make such a thing as laminate paint these days. I bought a little jar of it, had it tinted, and took it home. A few days and a lot of sweat later, I emerged from a bathroom that was not only a lovely shade of cream, but had a delft blue countertop that looked as if it had been extruded in that very color. I also installed a new medicine cabinet (we'd never had one, and were storing our boxes of pills in the hot water pipe access cupboard), and mirrors. The Mont caulked the bathtub, and I installed crown molding around the top of the room.

It's not fully updated, but I don't think anyone would cry at it.

The spare bedroom had a patch of plaster on the walls that had been ruined eight or nine years ago before we'd had a new roof installed. I replastered and sanded the area, then painted that entire wall with a new accent color the shade of a Kraft caramel. The office ceiling had stains from the same event, so I primed those a hundred times and painted them.

I mopped the basement floor, and walls. I removed the alarm system electronic pad, since it no longer works, and sealed up the circuit box for the system. I sanded and painted the railing on the front porch, and pulled little grasses and weeds from the cracks in the driveway and the patio. I sprayed down the siding on the house and the garage to make it look clean, and washed all the windows.

And then I packed. Oh, how I packed. Our realtor had made the gentle suggestion that many people in the market for a house didn't care to enter a home in which every square space of wall was covered with bookcases and tall, hulking piles of books that looked as if they'd come straight out of the dustier stacks of the Hogwarts library. I took the hint, and spent day after day buying boxes from Home Depot (sixty-seven cents apiece for the small ones, in case anyone's looking for a bargain), filling them with my books, and then leaving them in the living room. Then the next day I'd go buy another twenty-five boxes and do it all over again. Then, once I was done with the books, I did the same thing with all our DVDs and CDs.

Finally the living room became unnavigable; we had to borrow a dolly from church in order to move everything into the garage, where it could be out of sight during the house showings. No lie—this was the single most painful part of the entire month, especially as we did it on one of the hottest days on record this summer.

The last part of the process was simply cleaning everything and staging the house to make it look half-civilized, before we could let anyone inside. In a hundred-year-old house, it's not easy to make everything look new. But at the very least, it can feign cleanliness.

Not until this last Sunday, when I bravely cut and fitted a new window to replace the one on the garage that's been broken for a decade, did I realize I'd come almost to the very end of the long list of tasks I'd begun assembling on the day I learned we were moving to Connecticut. The only thing remaining—painting the upstairs hall ceiling—was not something I intended to do on the eve of a whirlwind tour to my future home. It'll wait until I get home.

It's a shame that my list is done. All the work, the day-to-day tasks and the grim realities of trying to whip things into shape, kept me from worrying too much about other things. The little short-term goals gave me a roadmap to follow. It's easier to think about how to sand something smooth, or what color to paint a wall, than it is to wonder the whys and whens of selling the house, or packing, or the unknowns of the impending move. I was happier pretending to know what I needed to do next, rather than fretting about the formless shape of days to come.