Strangers in the night
This is officially our first week of winter. It’s not very cold yet, but I’ve brought out my warmer clothes and put the doona on my bed. It’s good weather for snuggling under the doona with a purring cat or two. Not so good when I have to get up through the night and let the cat out, then in, and out again.
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Ollie has scratched a hole in the screen on the window, just big enough for her to crawl through. For a while I was leaving the window open a few inches at the bottom so she could come and go whenever she wished. This worked well, until a couple of the neighbourhood cats started to follow her through the hole in the screen.One night, I found a strange tabby cat in my kitchen, wearing a name tag that said “Billy.” I don’t know who Billy belongs to, nor the ginger cat that hangs around at night, hoping for a free meal. (He doesn’t need it – he looks well fed.) It was Ginger who came in through the window one night last week. All hell let loose as Ollie gave him the rounds of the house, and when I opened the door to let him out, she chased him down the street.
I closed the window after that, but the other night I was feeling very tired. Ollie was out when I went to bed and I didn’t want to have to get up again, so I left the window open. I had just dropped off to sleep when she came in. She’d brought me a gift – a live mouse!
The window is now staying closed.
I bought myself a fluffy angora jumper at our last jumble sale. It is so warm. I wore it when I went to visit my grandchildren one day. Three-year-old Hayley said, “Meemar, why are you wearing that jumper when it is covered in cat hairs?”
We’ve been selling plenty of winter clothes at our jumble sales, as well as plants, books and bric-a-brac. Our project this month is the Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia. We meet all kinds of interesting people. Last week a man bought a lot of cheap jewellery. He said he had told his grandchildren that their great grandfather had been a pirate. He was going to put the jewellery in a box and bury it at the beach. Then he’d take the children to the beach and get them to dig for treasure.Then there was the woman who told us she had trouble with constipation, and her doctor had told her to use suppositories. “I’ll try these Duracells tonight,” she said. I think she must have meant Duralax, because Duracells are batteries. I wonder if they made her eyes light up!
And then there’s the woman who shoplifts. She’s always well dressed, hair beautifully permed and face carefully made up. She doesn’t look needy. She could easily afford to pay for the items she gets from our jumble sales.
We’ve been suspicious for some time now. The earings that were on the table she came in…
“Did you sell them to anyone?” We ask one another.
“No, no one bought them,” and yet they have gone – and so has the woman. Other small items disappear each time she comes in.
Recently one of our helpers saw her definitely put something in her bag and she didn’t pay for it. “What are we going to do about her,” she asked me.
“We’ll have to make sure all our helpers are aware of what she is doing,” I said. “And when she comes in, one of us can stand nearby and keep an eye on her.”
“But she knows all of us. She’ll know we’re watching her.”
“That’s all the better,” I said. “If she knows she’s being watched, she’ll probably stop. Maybe she won’t come back.”
We can do without customers like her.
