The Haxtun-Fleming Herald - What can we reason but from what we know? -Alexander Pope

Things have a wonderful way of working out sometimes. Call it fate, predestination or just plain luck. There are times if you sat down and wrote out the best possible outcome for a situation, you never could dream up what actually happens.

Several years ago, Sue decided she wanted a cat. This surprised me because we already had about 20 hanging around the barns, haystacks and fields around our house. The problem was, she said, they are all wild and don’t come up around the house. She wanted one that could be fed, petted once in a while and would hang around the back door. Within a few days, my bride came home with a kitten from the feed store. Of course it was cute, black with a patch of white on its hip. She had already named her Patch.

Patch began her stay with us as an inside cat. Sue said this was necessary to get her used to us. I wasn’t too fond of finding a kitten, no matter how cute, curled up on my dinner plate but I mostly went along with the familiarization program. Soon Patch was ready to venture outside one Sunday morning. Her first walk outside was over to my pickup where she curled up on a tire for a cozy nap. You can take the story from here.

Patch survived, thanks to a Sunday morning emergency visit to the vet 10 miles away. We now had an $1,100 house pet. I would remind critics that it is cheaper than a divorce. Patch now lives in our house nearly full time, eating about $50 dollars a month in cat food, not counting those sacks of cat litter. Sensing her special status, Patch sleeps anywhere she chooses, making occasional trips outside, even an overnight adventure once in a while. She avoids my pickup like the plague, thankfully. She is, however, very interested in Sue’s latest project, a bird feeder outside the back door. She lays watching the visitors to the seed filled lunch room for hours on end. For some reason, after one of these excursions, her consumption of cat food drops. Patch seems to want to stay outside more, too.

The best part? Bird seed costs less than cat food. Who would ever have thought it would work out this good?