Inter-Michigan
- Kathryn
- Jul 22, 2016
- 2 min read

Today is my husband's birthday. I'm no longer married to a teenager: we're now both in our twenties.
Michigan is a magical place where corn is plentiful, no one locks their homes, corn is plentiful, Tim Horton's is open at all hours of the day and night, and corn is so very, very plentiful. Jack and I are calling our time here the inter-Michigan: an intermission between Massachusetts and Arizona.
Our worldly belongings are hibernating in the living room until we can get a stable place in Tucson, so right now we're living out of our boxes. The cat, at least, is happy about this. She loves boxes. She spent the entire fourteen-hour car ride slowly blanketing my skirt and shirt with a thick layer of cat hair, and now that she has a month to work she's getting a head start on giving the rest of my clothes the same treatment.
Our cat is a contortionist. She's figured out a way to lie across both my notebook and my computer at the same time. It nets her the warmth of the computer, the texture of the notebook, and the sweet joy of knowing that she has foiled my every attempt to be productive for the foreseeable future.
There are two other cats in my mother-in-law's home, which is where we're staying for the duration of our inter-Michigan. Lucy is an older cat who parks herself atop some boxes at the top of the stairs and surveys her kingdom with the knowing gaze of a queen. She and Kimono, our younger cat, are at the point where no one is hissing at each other anymore: I even caught the two of them rubbing noses the other day.
Kimono is a good cat. She has a number of qualities that make her a joy to be around. For example, she likes to be petted while she eats, and she will meow at you, and meow at you, and meow at you until you sit next to her and pet her while she eats. If there is a closed door, particularly a bathroom door, she will find it and cry at it until it opens. That's not the extent of her vocalizing, though: oh, no. There's more. She will wail, actually wail, when she wants to be chased around. Another cat won't do the trick: it must be you. I think of the popular myth about the aloof disinterest of cats, and I can't help but shake my head. Kimono is, I swear, the neediest cat in the world.
And then there's Dave.
I've seen Dave a handful of times, although it's more accurate to say that I've seen several vaguely Dave-shaped streaks. This cat moves exclusively from one hiding place to another. He's like the Flash, if the Flash was terrified of everything and determined not to be seen by mortal eyes. And ...
... Have I become the woman who only talks about her cats?
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