Cats and dogs

Waiting for an update? Well…

Any concern I might have had that Ember might bite Maisie’s head off is gone. Ember is desperate to meet Maisie properly and get to know her. We regularly attempt introductions. Sometimes Maisie goes straight under the bed. Ember sticks her nose under to say hello, but they speak different languages.

A few days ago I let Ember into the bedroom while Maisie was still on her tower, having just finished her breakfast. Ember was a very good girl. She approached slowly and cautiously. Eventually she got too close for comfort and Maisie hissed and took a swipe at her. Ember backed off (good girl!), then started moving slowly toward Maisie again. All going well, but then, in her excitement, Ember barked and that was that. Maisie leapt off the tower and made a beeline for the storage room with Ember in hot pursuit. Back to square one. And Ember, of course, was quickly dragged out of the bedroom and deposited on the other side of the baby gate at the top of the stairs.

There may come a time when Ember somehow makes the link between barking and rejection. I hope so, but she’s a barking dog.

When we first took up residence here back in November, Maisie had the bedroom, the bathroom, the walk-in closet…

… and the cluttered storeroom behind it, which offers many places to hide and a little bed.

Since then her world has expanded – thanks to a baby gate at the top of the stairs and a lot of clearing out.

One part of Dirk’s dream in building their dream home 20 years ago was a library – somewhere with built in, floor to ceiling bookshelves to hold all his books, a place to relax and read. He got the shelves, he put down a rug, he acquired an old, fairly comfy, slightly beat up chair, but the reading room never really happened. In no time at all, it was filled with clutter, including on top of the reading chair.

The clutter is gone!

A reading room, furnished with my loveseat and chair, complete with Maisie bed (which she loves) by the fire.

When we first talked about this (me moving in here) back in France, I said I didn’t think I could do it unless there was one room in the house that was mine. He got it, said the study could be cleared out and turned into my space. What I didn’t properly understand at the time was that the study had always been much more his partner’s room than his, so emptying it out was challenging. His space had mostly been the diningroom table or the kitchen counter. He also needed a room of his own. As per previous post, the storage room with its slanted ceilings had been discussed but was not really viable. Thus the dividing in half of the garage to allow us to create his (as I have dubbed it) orifice. Ember certainly approves of having a bed in there.

But I digress.

It took a while, but the green room eventually got emptied out. I haven’t figured out what is going to go where yet, but Maisie approves.

She’s properly laid claim to the room.

So now she has multiple rooms upstairs.

She is showing no interest in ever coming down to the ground floor and I do not want to introduce her to the cat flaps until she is comfortable roaming around the whole house. I’m not holding out for a photo of her and Ember curled up on the chaise together, but I so very much hope for at least semi-peaceful coexistence.

God knows when/if that will be. In the meantime, as I said to my friend Jean the other day, looks like for now Maisie is going to be an upstairs indoors cat. To which Jean replied: “Could be a lot worse.” True dat.