Hey, Diary!
Thomas started using the kitty litter today, so I guess he’s okay. All of my kittens are pretty smart. They’re five weeks old now, and they’re all toilet trained already and eating solid food. Mr. Harding never got the chance to tell me what kind to get for them, so we went to Cornwallis Veterinarians in Kentville yesterday and a really nice lady there told us what to buy. It was fun watching them try to eat it. Veronica kept sneezing, but she seemed to like it. Mom says maybe they won’t want their bottles so much any more, but so far they still do.
Mr. Harding is still in the hospital. I asked Mom what was wrong with him, and she said he had a stroke, whatever that is. She doesn’t know when he’ll be able to come home. I hope it’s soon.
The kittens play all the time, except when they’re sleeping. They like to pounce on each others’ tails, and they chase each other all over my bedroom. What’s really funny is, they can be running and playing and jumping one minute, and all of a sudden they just fall down all together in a heap and go to sleep. Mom says that’s because growing up is hard work, so they need plenty of rest.
I play with them lots. We bought them some toys from the vet, a couple of balls and a feather on a stick and two furry mice. But what they really like is a little twist of paper on the end of a string like the one I made for Maggie. They chase it and leap up in the air and pounce on it, and sometimes they even stalk it. Mom says they’re learning how to chase real mice, but I’m not ever going to let them do that. The vet told me that cats should always live indoors because so much can happen to them outside, like catching diseases and getting run over like Maggie did. And we don’t have any mice inside our house, at least I hope we don’t.
Jimmy still has to stay home, so I took Thomas over to his house to play this afternoon. I took a ball and the paper on a string, and Jimmy thought up a new toy. He was drinking some orange juice from a glass with a straw, and he took the straw out and kind of dragged it along the floor and wiggled it back and forth. Thomas all crouched down and looked very fierce, and when he jumped at the straw Jimmy pulled it away, so Thomas had to chase it. Jimmy let him catch it eventually, and he chewed on it with his little sharp teeth and put holes in it. I bet he thought it was a mouse.
I only stayed half an hour. Jimmy gets tired so easily. Just before I left I asked him if he’d fixed his seaplane yet, and he said he doesn’t need it any more.
Dad finished the tree elevator yesterday, and I can work it all by myself. It’s really neat, with lots of ropes and a whole bunch of pulleys. You sit in it and pull on the rope, and up it goes. Even if you pull really hard, the seat only goes up a little at a time, and Dad put some kind of a brake on it so that if you stop pulling, it doesn’t fall back down again. He says that’s for safety when Jimmy is in it. I meant to tell Jimmy about it today when I took Thomas over to see him, but I forgot again.
I won’t use the elevator much. That’s for Jimmy. It’s faster for me to climb up the two-by-fours.
I wish Jimmy could climb, too.
I sat up in the tree for a really long time today, and didn’t come down until Mom called me for supper. At first I just looked around. Nothing looks the same from up there. The clock tower at the university seems to be growing right out of the trees, and the steeple on the chapel too. Most of the houses have black roofs, but not all. There’s grey and red and brown, too. And everything looks cleaner from up high, and neater.
After I figured out where everything was, the stores downtown and all the university buildings and where my friends live, I started to make improvements. I planted flowers and trees in all the yards that didn’t have them, and I cut down the weeds in the vacant lot across the street and all the other vacant lots I could see. I painted some of the houses in really bright colours, especially Mr. Harding’s house next door. Then I decided to do something about the dykes.
The first thing I did was tear down the fence and the No Trespassing signs, and then I widened the old dirt road and smoothed it all out so I could ride my bike there, and Jimmy could take his wheelchair all the way down to the water. I made all the ditches deeper and filled them with water from the bay so they looked just like shiny silver rivers, and I planted rows of giant trees on top of the dykes. Finally I cut down the tall weeds so I could see all the tigers, and when they couldn’t find anyplace to hide anymore, they ran off toward the bay and jumped in the water and swam all the way to Quebec.
I never knew there could be so many tigers.
Then I discovered the most amazing thing. When you’re up in a tree, you can see bird nests that you don’t ever notice from the ground. One of them was in my maple tree, and it was below the platform so I could look inside. There were two baby blue jays in it, only they were really big babies, almost as big as their mother. I watched them for a long time. They’re all kind of ruffled up, not smooth like you’d expect.
And insects. The tree is full of them, beetles and crawly things with long legs and some that look almost like ants, but with wings. And spiders! I don’t like those.
Did I mention we have squirrels, too?
Mom keeps five bird feeders in the back yard, two on poles and three hanging from tree limbs. Lately she’s been complaining that the seeds are disappearing too fast, and I discovered why. A little striped chipmunk was sitting on one of the feeders, stuffing seeds into his cheek pouches just as fast as he could.
The world is so full of life.
The cat from down the street wandered into the yard. It’s a yellow one like Thomas, and it poked around in Mom’s flower bed for a while, and then all of a sudden it got really still and all hunkered down. Its tail started twitching and it sort of wiggled its rear end back and forth like I’d seen the kittens do, and it pounced! I thought I heard something scream, and I could see a dark grey something in the cat’s mouth, and it stood up and started out of the yard and began to grow, bigger and bigger, until it was a really big tiger, and just before it disappeared around the corner of the house next door I got a really good look at what it was carrying in its mouth, and it was Jimmy, and I screamed too.