How a Cat Looks at a Room
It started innocently enough, a hop from the floor to the window ledge with the help of the radiator. So we rearranged our plants and let Reese’s peer out the window. A few days later, we got the first sign this could be something serious. Perched on the back of the couch, she vaulted onto the top of the dresser door and from there clambered up onto the suitcases stacked above.
She liked the privacy of the back corner of the suitcases, often heading there to sleep once we turned the lights off ourselves. During the day, she was a little more mischevious, poking her head over the edge or weaseling her way inside an unzipped suitcase for a few minutes before emerging like a butterfly from its coccoon.
When the suitcases started to get old, Reese’s figured out a way to lower her front paws ever so gently onto the top of another dresser door, slowly twist her body and plunge into the top cabinet, where she could nuzzle against my clothes in near darkness. Though impressive when it worked, Reese’s looked like a damn fool when the door started to swing wide from the weight of her body and left her dangling over a four-foot chasm. Once or twice, she even spilled off. We tried not to laugh.
A few weeks later, it was time for another challenge. Silly us, we’d been storing her food on the top shelf of the bookcase, right next to the window ledge. Even with only a narrow opening between a row of books and the food bag, Reese’s made it work, leaping through the gap for a crash landing. Away the food went, stashed on top of the bookcase, high enough that I could only reach it on my tiptoes.
It’d be unfair, though, to crudely portray Reese’s as a food-crazed recluse. She was also obsessed with getting outside. The first time I forgot to close the doors behind me on the balcony, she followed after me and launched herself at the three-foot high railing. I grabbed her down in mid-flight, but it was a lesson learned.
It made me pause, then, whenever I opened the top window above her favorite ledge for ventilation. It sure looked high enough…. One night, however, as Nikki and I drifted off to sleep, the sound of claws clashing on wood jolted us awake to the silhouette of Reese’s in the open window, staring 30 feet down on the street below her.
We honestly thought that was it. A few months went by with Reese’s alternating between her bookshelf and the suitcases, as well as the occasional window escapade. But eventually the thought of all that food above the bookcase drove her mad. All I heard the first time was a crash, turning around to find Reese’s sniffing out a bag of Kit-e-Kat. And even though we moved the food again, this time into a secure dresser, she kept going back, happy for another place to sleep, even more remote before.
For several days, we were completely mystified as to how she did it. The bookcase, made of hard enameled wood, was situated in a corner. Somehow she would clamber up the side, her approach hidden from our sight. When I finally caught her in the act, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Starting on the window ledge, Reese’s took a ferocious jump into the wall, bouncing off with ease and turning her body to grab the top of the bookcase and pull herself up.
Only one challenge remained. The balcony doors that we often kept open when the room was too hot. There was a window at the top, a good seven feet above the ground. Reese’s plotted her escape for months. At times, she would test herself, jumping a few feet off the ground to sink her claws into the wood and hang there, before dropping back down. She fell so pitifully short that we thought little of it.
But she would not be denied. One day away she went for it, closing the first three feet on the first jump, yanking her body a few feet further with her claws, then latching onto the bottom of the window opening to make it the rest of the way. All Nikki and I could do was applaud.
