A cat flits through my garden like a ghost. Solitary, aloof and arrogant, he alights for a few brief seconds – on a post, or a trellis or the crotch of one my dwarf fruit trees – barely long enough for mutual appraisal. As a visitor he is silent but once camouflaged in the woods a dozen steps beyond the garden fence, he breaks out in a raucous ‘meow’.
Kitty – as I call him- is a catbird, as curious and mysterious as his four legged counterpart. A sleek gray bird with a black cap and mischievous eyes, all legs and long lines like a model on a runway. As spring blooms and blossoms, Kitty decides to adopt me.
His visits are always so dramatic. He swoops around my head like a slingshot, setting the brim of my droopy hat askew, and perches on the mid-size sour cherry tree that is the centerpiece of my garden. Then he cocks his head while I sputter and straighten my hat.
‘Meow?’ he asks innocently when I scold him, my afternoon a shade brighter. There is an extra bounce in my step when he appears, and a smile I can’t shake off. Because wherever I go in my garden, Kitty follows, staying just out of reach. I swear I can discern a different meaning in each of his meows. My springtime chores are made lighter by his company- repairing the fence, turning beds, spreading compost, planting, watering, seeding, weeding, wrapping the seedling beds with frost-protection fabric and endlessly fighting the wind that wants to rip it off. All the tasks that help me make an early sale of cold hardy greens and root vegetables from my little market garden. And occasionally give me the sniffles.
Partway through spring when I’m homebound for a few days due to allergies, Kitty comes to visit. He looks comical, perched on the narrow ledge outside my living room window, wobbling and teetering while trying to peek inside. I feel the warm glow of friendship, knowing that he mistrusts being this far from the woods.
By end May, spring garden gives way to summer crops- bush beans, colorful one-bite cherry tomatoes, frilly aromatic mounds of parsley loved by swallowtail butterflies. I’m reminded of my plan to take out the strawberry bed, by the drone of bees busily pollinating its little white flowers.
I have a love-hate relationship with my strawberry bed. It’s aging – with rust spots, bare stretches and meager fruit, a blight on my gardening real estate. But every spring the onerous task of smothering it with sheet mulch slips down my list of priorities until I am seduced by the scent of its fruit, blush pink darkening to fire engine red. This year has been no different. I let the bed be.
Now that I want strawberry, I see Kitty as a potential pest. So I place hoops along the length of the bed and stretch bird netting over the hoops. Over the next couple of weeks I am peripherally aware of berries plumping up and ripening into glistening riotous red hearts, but I am too busy pruning and staking tomato vines that are languidly snaking every which way, trellising pole beans whose shoots wander into my pockets, watering, watering, watering…
Until it’s mid-June and the berries smell just right.
I can barely keep from singing as I kneel down and lift up the netting. Then I notice gouge marks on the biggest juiciest ones. My serenity evaporates.
‘Kitty!’ I thunder, standing up and looking for the guilty party.
‘Meow?’ he cocks his head, but for once I have no patience for his innocent looks.
‘Was that you?’ I point an accusing finger at the savaged strawberry bed.
‘Meow!’ he flies off his perch and onto the mulched walkway next to the strawberry bed. I find that he has discovered a fist-sized hole in the netting. In one fluid leap he is inside. Then he runs down the bed like a greedy kid at a buffet, biting another ‘X’ into every berry along the way.
‘No! No! No!’ I fairly roar.
Even enraged, I marvel at the trust he displays in our friendship. That he shows me how he got inside. It’s not like he’s sneaking in. After all, friends share, right?
Bugs, worms, seed heads – yes.
Strawberry- NO!
It occurs to me that I have neglected to communicate boundaries. I cover the hole in the net. Foul words replace the music playing earlier in my head.
On my next visit I find the cover askew and freshly mutilated strawberries. Clearly I need stronger measures if I am to have any strawberry at all for myself. A primal possessiveness comes over me – mine, mine, my precious! I forget that the bed is a waste of space.
The hoops and netting make a collapsible, see-through tunnel over the elongated strawberry bed. So the next time Kitty hops inside – completely nonchalant – I put my foot down, literally. I step on the netting, cutting off his exit. It’s not hard to corner him; after all, he’s inside a net, with a dead end.
‘Don’t mess with the human,’ I say smugly as he flaps around in panic. Then I lift a corner of the net so he can escape. That, I think, should teach him that getting inside a net is dangerous. Wishful thinking as it turns out.
Kitty’s narrow escape makes him even bolder, and more affectionate towards me.
Could it be- he thinks I saved him from an accident, that I rescued him? This bird is dense. He jumps back inside the net.
I trap him again. This time, I pick him up off the ground. There’s a long pause in which we survey each other up close and for the first time in out acquaintance, I become aware of his delicate beauty- the curve of beak, the russet patch under his tail, fine grey feathers splayed like eyelashes against my dirt-encrusted yellow glove. His heartbeat ricochets around in my fist, legs whirring, huge black eyes twin pools of panic.
Within that space – a heartbeat or a breath – reality tilts and shifts. I become aware that I’m holding a wild thing. Fierce, funny, fragile and feral – he’s a microcosm of Nature. It feels like a sacrilege to hold him squirming and flightless. My fingers start to loosen, until I remember that he’s a thief in want of an etiquette lesson.
I bring him closer to my face, in a show of human dominance.
‘No!’ I say sternly.
‘Meow!’ he screeches in defiance.
‘No!’
‘Meow!!”
I interpret that as ‘yo’, as in yes. Close enough. I let him go. He flies off into the woods, his wingtip a sharp rap against my cheek showing me the depth of his hurt at my betrayal. I repair my net, heart heavy and ill at ease. Strawberries still disappear though I don’t see Kitty anymore. I hear him meowing sullenly, hidden in the dense foliage of the woods.
Summer warms and ripens. The woods thicken with pretty berries that I instinctively know are not for me. I watch the branches come alive with feathered kin- raucous blue jays, cardinals like errant flames, bits of yellow goldfinch and gray flashes of catbird. One even comes to visit my garden. She’s pudgy and squat and very polite, always announcing her arrival with a rattle of the fence or a scrabble against the tree bark. As soon as I look up, she drops down to pick up a bit twig or a discarded string and takes off. So respectful of my territory, asking permission before taking. We don’t bond.
My eyes keep searching for Kitty.
But he doesn’t return.
Kitty drops out of my life as abruptly as he had dropped into it. I’ve been ghosted. Late summer is dismal. I miss him, his quirky companionship, the sweet teasing kiss of his wingtip.
Kitty the thief has stolen my heart.
