Last weekend, D put the finishing touches on a screened-in patio/catio so the felines of the house could go out with us and stare at all the confounding other furry things that live and travel through the backyard. Woodine was out with all her now-grown chuckie children, a racoon maybe lives under the porch, deer roam on the outskirts, and Roquelle the bear attempted to break into the compost bin—although that was at a nighttime hour when we weren’t watching. Not to mention all the grasshoppers, moths, and flying insects that pop in and out of the screened area that need to be chased. So there we were, one happy household—the up-on-two leggers watching the four-legged ones chase things around while contained from the much greater outdoors. We adults felt satisfied that the cats could have the best of all things: an inside/outside world for them to travel in&out as they pleased.

The old saying: “Man plans, the gods laugh.” or “You build it, they’ll breach it.” Right, so that last one is altered but both happen to be true in our case. Midweek I came out to find the boy cat sitting on top of the wooden beams surrounding the joint. He’d jumped on a table, then climbed the screen, and hoisted up onto the top ledge. When I shrieked and told him to get down, he looked at me with the cat equivalent of a shrug and walked the perimeter onto the roof of the house and began climbing toward the front as I grabbed the cat treats while D grabbed a ladder and we tried to figure out the best place to get a hold of him. By this point it was raining and the roof slippery and he was visibly freaked looking down and realizing Holy Hell, that’s a loong way to the ground. What had apparently started as Desi’s big adventure was quickly turning into Desi does disaster. As D and I circled the perimeter to track him, I understood why cats get stuck in trees. They want to go up higher, higher, up there…then they look down.

A couple of things about that: The need to see how far/high you can get without looking back, the desire for escape from the place you are because obviously there’s something more interesting just on the other side—if only you can get there. In my early days in New York City, a dear friend (hello, M) worked at the Great Jones Cafe where the firemen from the f.house down the street would come and sit at the bar. One of them once told her that if we knew what was really going on out there in the city, we’d never leave our apartments. An apocryphal story perhaps, possibly embellished in my mind/memory, not to mention a thing a fireman out to impress a pretty woman might say to pump up his machismo, yet in a broader sense, sure, yeah, no doubt some truth there. And really, what to do with that statement anyway? The play on fear is there: scary monsters around all corners so why bother to try stepping out at all? Yet we do, obviously. We step out, we step in it, we stumble, fall, crawl, skip, stroll, and usually land somewhere where the experience of getting there and back has enlightened us in some way. Things get broken, built, illuminated, and in some way, hopefully, used in a bigger life kind of way.

Moving here was an adventure into a new kind of being for sure. I’m currently staring out a window into a dense stand of trees where some gusty winds are bending branches and perhaps our power will go out because that seems to happen pretty often (we have a backup generator so it’s not too disruptive). I’ve never lived in a place like this yet it’s amazing: calming and invigorating, a lot of beauty, a huge helping of unknown, a quickened pulse around What’s that sound? Early days (i.e., one month ago), I stepped out into my morning strolls with a slight red-riding-hood attitude. My tra-la-la was the excitement to hear birds without any thoughts of meeting bears. I know that I’m not the target of the wild things that live here. To them, I’m the wild thing to stay away from but yet, I do have that holster of bear spray just in case. Talking to friends the other night (hi, W & A) brought home how two of us were very concerned with my carrying the holster and applying the tick spray before every outing, the other, who grew up in a more rural area, laughed and said, “We had bears and never carried bear spray,” then she shrugged, adding, “it’s really about what makes you feel safe.” True that, because no matter how much I think I’m prepared, there’s really no way to be, ferFuxSake. And that is of course the point in all of life. Even though I don’t think about it every time I wake up in the morning, walk out the door during the day, then lock it behind me every night, there is always a certain amount of suspension, a kind of whoop, here we go, that happens emotionally and physically. I carry my own version of safety in some unseen holster.

I could arm myself with everything I think I need and then something will come along and I’ll realize, dang, this is new and boy am I’m unprepared for it. I’ll be left to find a way to deal with it. Maybe it will be fine. Maybe it won’t. Maybe redefining “fine” is the thing. But apparently, I am going to continue to push out into the world and find out what’s up ahead.

In the end, Desi was brought back into the house without falling off the roof and while he was hella freaked out about the adventure—the signs being dilated pupils and laying prone on the floor in the living room for quite a little while as his sister stared at him with a kind of you’re-a-fool look on her face—two days later, he scaled the screen just like before. An attempted repeat performance except that this time we’d put up a barrier blocking his exit. As he tried to back down the screen, which is actually an impossible thing for a cat to do apparently, he tumbled onto the BBQ (unhurt), then to the ground (still unhurt), and rushed inside apparently mortified, maybe embarrassed if cat’s feel such a thing? But it’s clear from the way he still looks longingly at the top patio beam that he’ll continue to try and get over, get out, see that place unknown which must hold an adventure he hadn’t had before. I get it. He may be grumpy about not getting there the way he planned, and no explanation about how Roquelle, Woodene, and the racoon are really not suitable playmates or hunting possibilities because, you know, no shared language, but still he’ll keep on trying because of course he will. It’s in his nature. I feel it’s still in mine as well.