Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

 

When I began to consider a single yellow cat, nothing about it seemed life-changing. It was just one shy, feral cat watching me as I watched him. I journaled about him around Easter of this year. That quick exchange of glances, and my subsequent interest, somehow triggered an eruption of yellow cats. Five of them live on my front porch now, and one has become a pet.

Animals know things we no longer sense as a species. I think humans probably had even keener senses millions of years ago—keener than other animals. We could smell trouble. We could sense a bad player in the room. We still catch faint echoes of these instincts, but we are far too quick to dismiss them.

Why did we depart from something so vital to our survival? Largely because those senses are no longer necessary. As I typed those words, my wife said, "I am glad these cats don't have to fight for survival and look for food anymore."

Have we dulled our instincts down to the point where we are domesticated beasts ourselves? Tiger, our aforementioned pet, has taken a keen interest in the inside of our house. While we maintain a strict "no indoor pets" rule, Tiger is actively lobbying for change. He slips through the door with an expression that says, I could just lay here. I wouldn't bother a soul. Or maybe... what’s in this room? Could this be my room?

We pick him up and carry him back to the porch, which, in Tiger’s opinion, is simply not where he belongs. He imagines porch life is best for the other cats because they are wild. He is not wild. Tiger wants to sit on cushions and drink cool, filtered water. Tiger secretly thinks he is more human than anything.

I will admit that having animals around is much better than having most people around. I enjoy good company and we have our favorite friends, but beyond the few people we truly love like family, I’d much rather be in the presence of animals. Even lizards are somewhat comfortable at our house. And while squirrels are busily unraveling overhead power lines, it is hard to stay angry when you watch them play. Squirrels incorporate play more than any wild animal I’ve ever watched. I’ll see one hiding from another and their game becomes an Olympic sport. They are surely keeping score.

Chipmunks are the cutest animals around here, but ours are more Monk and less chip. They have work to do, and foraging has to happen on the run. Every chipmunk meal is fast food; otherwise, one of our pterodactyls—also known as hawks—might drop in. I call them Monks because they are not societal in the least. When I see one, I’ll say, "Nice coat," and you can already hear them trailing off on the run with a faint, Thank youooo.

What we do not have are rats or mice. The only mouse I saw this year was a limp one being hauled to the woods by Big Head Ed. He rarely ventures into the eastern woods behind our house, but I think he was taking his prey down there to mark his territory—letting other mice know this is not a mouse-friendly property.

Snakes? We used to see an occasional snake around here. It gets a bit snaky near the sheds and old tree limb debris in the woods, but snakes seem wary of the cat population lately.

Opossums? Oddly, our cats don't mind them in the least. They share core genes, and cats and opossums seem to remember they were part of the same family some 160 million years ago. Cats don’t get upset when an opossum shows up on the porch in the middle of the night to steal Meow Mix. I’ve turned on the light to see this on many occasions. The cats just look at me through the window as if to say, Don’t worry about him. That’s our cousin, Fred. He’s the night janitor; this is his lunch break.

Deer pass through, too. If we keep our distance, a deer will sometimes watch us with matched curiosity, chewing away. But deer maintain a strict boundary. They look at me and seem to think, Well, you don’t have a gun, and you don’t look like you could run all that fast either, so zoom in and take your picture—but that’s close enough. Take one step too many, and a survivalist deer is gone in a flash.

Thoreau famously wrote about the animals he watched while living by Walden Pond, once observing a white-lipped forest snail for an entire day. I think what he learned from animals may have been his most important lesson of all:

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

I’ve learned a lot from yellow cats.