View from the North 40: Just keep freaking until the pheromones kick in

I didn’t even know that cat pheromone diffusers existed. Really, who thinks of making an electricity driven device that dispenses feline happy-pheromones, so how was I supposed to know that I should have one for my cat, Tony-O.

I mean, it sounds like something Hollywood made up to solve a problem in a movie or TV series. Like, they really like the stressed-cat backstory, but in the scene before the pivotal scene for the main character they need the cat bit to fade from focus so one of the writers says, “Hey, she’s a scientist, why don’t we just have her synthesize some cat happy-pheromones and put them in a Glade plug-in thing, then we just show the cat laying in its bed, high on life and purring. We’ll add a fake fog in post-production.”

Yeah, no.

My husband and I make our cat learn to cope with change the same way we do — with bouts of freaking out and/or eating too much accenting days of hiding from the world. It’s family tradition.

This time, though, he got to hide out in his kitty fort while we had to power through, shuffling the bare minimum of human necessities from the old dwelling, which we had to abandon in single-digit temps and double-digit wind, to the new dwelling.

If you’ve been tracking my past few columns then you know that John and I had a rather abrupt and unanticipated move from our old trailer house to what is/is going to be our new house — a remodeled part of our existing shop. We’re dragging only the needed and the fragile stuff along with us for now because the new place is still very much under construction.

Emphasis on both “very” and “much.”

Poor Tony who couldn’t figure out why we weren’t going home to the old home to sleep at night so he could get his treats in the treat spot and his food and water in the eating spot and have all his routines in order, especially his winter outdoor (unauthorized) latrine, a.k.a. the hay barn, just a few yards away. (He thinks litter boxes are uncivilized.)

His cushy chair with the fluffy blanket was abandoned. The his spot on the desk to look out the window was no more. The hidey-hole under the old house could not be replicated under the new house. There’s no front step to sit on to look out on the coulee.

Even his shop was changing, with too much cleaning and reorganizing and mixing of items from the trailer house into the shop house.

It was kitty hell.

And to add insult to injury, it was too cold outside for him to just run away for a few days like any sensible once-feral cat would do.

John joked that it takes Tony at least five minutes to process any change and he was having to put up with 1,337 of them. Even though it was a joke, that 4.64 day turned out to be right.

The first day Tony tried to keep track of us, but it was too much. All of it. Too much. The nervous adrenaline short-circuited him. He stopped asking to come into the new house then he stopped coming when called. He retreated to the cat fort. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have given us a dead bug for an opposable thumb, but he would’ve paid a million juicy mice for a middle finger.

For the next three days, at the end of the day he would come slinking cautiously into the house and carefully search out each change, each new item, each moved item, whiskers twitching like sophisticated sensory devices. He would reconcile the blending of smells and stuff from what was his two homes into the one new home, sleep with us for a few hours then ask to escape to his fort again. The one sacred space that had not changed.

About halfway through the fifth day, he walked into the house, looked around at the changes, but while striding across the floor straight to the bedroom where he jumped up on the bed and fell asleep like he owned the joint.

That night he stayed with us all night. I’d say he slept in the house, but every time either John or I woke up he’d be there purring at the foot of the bed or right in our faces.

So who needs to buy a pheromone diffuser when your cat is willing to manufacture and dispense his own for free — effective in four and a half days. And the actual-cat happy-pheromone diffuser comes with a built-in purr feature that let’s you know it’s working, even while you’re sleeping.

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The horses, on the other hand, have loved the move from the start. Now they can stand there just 30 feet from the house looking in the windows begging for food like they have a starring role in the latest remake of a Dickens novel at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .