Mandatory Parker: "From Brat Summer To Manul Winter"

The Lint-Covered Breast Implant Faces the Cold…Again.

Winter is less than a week away, and Parker does not care for it in the slightest. Mind you, “winter” in North Texas is a matter of perspective. Aside from a prominent frost last month, we still haven’t had sustained freezing temperatures, and the warmth of October and November means that only now are trees changing color and dropping leaves. We have less of a winter than a rainy season, and the monsoons are coming. With his obsession with going outside, even if only supervised runs in the back yard, this is going to be a long holiday season.

That combination, dropping leaves and rain, is why Parker is so put out. This being his third winter at the Toad Ranch, he now anticipates the sudden shift from blasting heat to shuddering cold. He’s not happy with the shortening of days, and knows days were considerably longer a mere six months ago, but he puts up with the time changes. He absolutely adores going out in December sun, especially when he can sit in the sun without bursting into flame. He literally twitches at the door while watching leaves fall, screaming at me to let him out at them. I’ve known many dogs that love blasting through leaf piles, but until now, I’ve never encountered a cat that deliberately burrows through leaves like a Martian sand shark, just waiting for me or anybody else to pass close enough to jump out and chase. Most of all, he simply puffs up, sits on his tail, and impersonates the one wild cat that shares his general personality: the manul. The previous two Decembers, things were dry enough that he got everything he wanted.

What Parker didn’t know is that the last couple of winters were remarkably dry compared to the average, and we’re at least trying to go back to average, at least as far as rainfall are concerned. Neither of us are complaining about the unseasonal warm temperatures (it’s obviously way before his time, but I still have the occasional nightmare about Christmas Eve 1989, when we dropped to within one degree F and everything in the area froze solid, including the sewer pipe near my apartment that turned every flush in the adjoining building into a geyser), but we’re finally getting a bit of rain to fill reservoirs and aquifers. Things are greening up a bit, at least with those plants more attuned with temperature and moisture than with photoperiod. This definitely doesn’t apply to the monster oak trees in my neighborhood, including the beast in the back yard, but a heavy rainfall encourages their denuding, and we got a heck of a storm last night. This meant a back yard and driveway just plastered with soggy leaves, a hastily-raked pile in the middle of the yard comprised of 2024’s leaf output covering the back alley, and a breast implant with delusions of grandeur yelling at me about the injustice of it all.

Even the most anencephalic Irish setter (and I repeat myself) would be hard-pressed to get joy from jumping into moist piles of leaves. and my grandmother had two that tried. Other dogs, children, the occasional Komodo dragon…all would be bummed by the cold and wet. Most cats avoid the issue entirely by skirting the leaf pile. Parker, though? To listen to him, I should be out with a hair dryer, crisping every leaf to his satisfaction.

(This is the point in the story where I should note that Parker has a much larger cult and reader base than I ever did, and I get suggestions on how to redress his grievances with the universe. One of these came from my girlfriend Sarah, Millie to my Moxxie, when she learned that a corner grocery store had a special on propane-powered porch heaters. Quite understandably, she thought that getting one for Parker to fend off the outdoor chill was a reasonable expenditure to ensure his eternal happiness, until I explained that he’d never stay in one place if I did. Instead, he’d move from basking spot to basking spot, expecting me to move the heater to his latest location, and I had no intention of teaching him even the possibility that humans could and would move his heat source at his whim. When that happens, he starts paying rent, and he thinks he’s too cute for that.)

Now, if we had a repeat of the 1989 cold surge, we’d at least get entertainment of the “10-kilo cat trying to balance himself on one foot while shaking the other three” kind: my late cat Jones was a master of that art form, yowling about going outside in elbow-deep snow and then yowling louder when I tried to herd him back inside. Instead, we get pure uncut Cat: screaming to be let out, going out until the cold becomes oppressive, usually in about five minutes, screaming to be let inside, getting a mouthful of food, and then screaming to go out again. Since he’s never allowed out the front door, he’s convinced that the summer heat never let up out front, and he absolutely MUST go out to experience the neighborhood thermocline. He’s occasionally let into the garage, usually when I need to make a phone call that njeeds no further embellishment from a brown-furred feline delinquent, but he’s angrier every day that the garage isn’t the toasty haven it was all through September and October, and he remembers the disparity. I remember the same frustrations with expressing myself at his age, as well as my various attempts to rectify those frustrations, which helps explain why I never had children, as well as my relief at Parker’s lack of opposable thumbs or easy access to fire.

Even with all of this, the only absolute is change. By the winter solstice, temperatures threaten to hit freezing, which should dry out the leaf piles. The overwhelming majority of the leaves go onto the garden later in the week, and the remnants and the last of the leaves currently on the trees get a last mowing of the season to chop them up and expedite their decomposition. No more leaves means no more lizards or snakes to chase, but more squirrels and native finches, all of whom are much faster and more aware than Parker is. With January and February comes the possibility of snow, something Parker has never faced, and THAT’s when I will be relieved that I didn’t cross a porch propane heater with a self-driving lawn mower and give Parker his own sycophantic heat source. This cat has too much power over me as it is.

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Mandatory Parker manul winter