Trauma.
4:40: All three cats bawling, spinning and scraping around
in their cages, systematically probing both their physical confinement
and my own tenuous grip on sanity for the smallest fault or
fissure.
4:45: All three cats lounging around the house, as if
nothing had happened.
Sigh.
All these house showings are really stressful for the cats. We
know that not every potential buyer is an animal lover, and even some
self-described “animal lovers” are really just “dog lovers” anyway.
So it’s just as important that the house show no trace of
feline habitation as it is important that the house show as
little evidence of our existence as well. (Obviously this is
impossible without moving out, but you sort of try to approximate the
paradoxically impersonal “model home” coziness when you’re selling a
house.)
This subtle real-estate psychology is lost on the cats, who simply
wonder why we pack them into tiny boxes, which we then toss into a
larger box with wheels, which then bumps noisily across state Highway
6 for an eternity (to a cat).
Or, if we have a shorter showing that doesn’t merit an hourlong
roundtrip, this wheeled box drives two minutes to the Target parking
lot, where it and its inhabitants sit motionless, making the
septuagenarian security personnel extremely nervous.