I just had a hurricane here in my home office that lasted all of 2.4 seconds.

I've been working at my desk for a few hours. As is normally the case on quiet warm days here in the northwest, my boycat Danny lay sleeping in the sun next to the computer in the "outgoing mail" tray.

A white cat who lives next door is friends with our cats in that standoffishly aloof and tolerant manner neighbor cats often have with each other. She's very timid around my husband and I, but I've often seen our two cats and the white cat sleeping in the tall grass just a yard or two apart, so I know they're comfortable being near each other.

A few times I've walked into the kitchen and surprised the white cat as she snitched food from our cats' bowls, so I know she's even been in our house. I work at home, though, so it doesn't happen often. From those experiences I know she's jumpy about being unexpectedly caught inside.

From how I reconstruct what just happened in my office, the white kitty must have crept in and climbed onto the carpeted shelf just below my vision line at the front of my desk and near the window. I'm going to guess that she, like Danny, had been fast asleep for some time.

Not knowing she was there, I opened the side drawer on my desk. The sound of the metal drawer sliding apparently startled the sleeping white cat on the other side of the desk who suddenly realized I was in the office. In a panic she jumped straight up, scaring Danny who didn't know the white cat was sleeping a foot away.

He jumped even higher, knocking the tray he'd been sleeping in onto the floor thwarting her escape route, which rattled the white cat so much she leaped onto the curtain (!) four feet in the air.

The white cat gripping the curtain a foot above his head completely unnerved Danny, and he scrubbed out on the surface of the desk.

The white cat jumped off the curtain and dove for the door. Danny's feet made grip-contact with the desk and he leaped into the air toward the door at the same second.

One of them, in the blur I couldn't tell which, landed on top of the other and a scrambling tumbleweed of paws and tails flew in cat chaos out the door. Which scared the heck out of me!

A moment later, aside from my mail tray sitting on the floor, my office was calm again.

The white cat and Danny sat halfway across the yard in the sun, doing what all cats do after an embarrassing moment, studiously licking themselves like it never happened.

Copyright © Jacqueline Freeman