In honor of Thanksgiving this year, Bob and I and our good friends Chuck and Phyllis decided to take a ride up to Boston and visit the Plimouth Plantation. The Chuckster, of course, came along for the ride, eager to see what a seventeenth century English village looked like.
Chuckie has a very active imagination for a cat, and he decided to pretend as we arrived in the parking lot of this living history museum, that he was really back in 1627.
What harm could that do?
The museum is divided into two sections: the 17th C English village along the shore of the Plymouth Harbor and the 17th C Native American Wampanoag homesite located along the Eel River.
It was a bit nippy outside and by the time we arrived in the village--late--we had no trouble letting Chuck wander around on his own. He has a thing for sniffing the grass, sampling the vegetation, and he didn’t hesitate when it came to hopping in and out of the herb gardens behind the twenty or so timber-framed houses. No harm done. We also explored the houses themselves, eyeing the quaint (translation super small) quarters, fireplaces, narrow beds, tiny tables and sparse furniture that constituted living arrangements almost 400 years ago.
All was well until . . .
I spotted the temptation before Chuck did, but there was little I could do about it. Stacked firewood. Now, at home, the Chuckster has a thing for climbing up or jumping up on piles of firewood--outside--neatly stacked. And Chuck is no lightweight. When he hits that stack with all his weight, something is sure to go a tumbling--the wood.
This stacking of firewood was like the mother of all stacking--imagine a circular arrangement of the wood, where the wood all comes together in the center, fanning out like a beautiful fan that’s been opened.
Chuck made a run for it. And I knew, just knew what he was going to do--make a running leap and hop up on top of it.
I imagined it all--some, if not all, of the stacked wood crashing to the ground below.
There was no way to stop the kid. No way at all.
I closed my eyes and waited. Secretly praying that no one else would witness the fiasco.
There was nothing. No crash. Nothing. What?
I peered out.
Chuck sat on top of the woodpile, like the King of the Mountain, and surveyed his seventeenth century kingdom.
Okay, maybe he dislodged one or two pieces.
Still, the kid was in trouble. With me.
The potential of what could have happened . . .
But he looked so cute posing up there. His big belly . . .
And, as he spied me getting closer, he knew just what to do--he jumped on down and posed on the ground.
You got to love a cat that will do what he has to do, even if it makes his mother crazy and comes this close to getting us kicked out of a living history museum!!!
