The Man in the Moon?... Or Who? by Christine Larsen Long after giving birth to her last litter of kittens, Smokey began noticing the moon differently. At 19 years old, she wasn’t altogether sure if she was losing it or actually finding a new reality. It had all begun when she was teaching her son, Speedy, how to lap water from a bowl, instead of forever hanging from her for sustenance. The magic happened one night when the moon reflected itself in her bowl of water. (It really wasn’t HER bowl at all.) This one was outside and belonged to the dogs, but they were nowhere near and the big bowl gave her far more benefits than her own cat-bowl inside.
“I can see the Easter Bunny in the moon,” declared the youngest, Nicky; getting up and jumping about a bit. It was so exciting and all this laying about was too difficult for a small, enthusiastic boy. Michaela and Brett nodded vigorously. They needed to do a quick jig of their own before settling once again. Both children agreed with their young brother, having always seen the same, and simply figured this was the BIG bunny’s home in between Easters. Bizarrely, Mum and Dad had never shared this vision, though they tried… HARD!
Smokey naturally took advantage, visiting here often on still moonlit nights, loving how the intensity of the reflected moon in the water glowed like a halo around her head. Its magic puzzled her greatly, becoming more and more disturbing to her valuable sleep time as she dreamt of quests and schemes to discover the truth of who indeed inhabited that mystic moon. In faraway days of early motherhood, the major problem was being fresh out of time because of the incessant demands of her furry family. When she found time to scratch herself, that’s what she did… thoroughly. And washing. Did it never end? One day, she promised herself—but that one day took a long time to happen, as Life kept getting in the way.
Smokey agreed. Could she have talked ‘human’, she’d have shared her particular concerns. No-one, it seemed, gave consideration to the Cat and her Fiddle of Hey Diddle Diddle fame; and although Smokey had heard of a cow jumping OVER the moon, there were no reports of one getting stuck there. And that little dog laughing?!? That wasn’t any of her canine sisters—Gypsy, Taffy, or Sheba. Annoyingly, even the dinnerware got in on that rhyming act, with a final, dramatic mention, when… ‘the dish ran away with the spoon’.
One still night, her two-legged family lay on rugs out on the lawn, studying the star-studded sky and its amazing focus this night… the Harvest Moon. Mum and Dad told the kids details of its surface were the clearest seen in memory, according to the experts. That set them to wondering if there was, in fact, a ‘Man in the Moon’. Dad said there had been, in 1969, but only for a short time—two days, he thought, those Earth visitors were there. Mum said last Christmas Eve she’d seen the silhouette of Father Christmas, his reindeer and sleigh sailing across the moon, although there’d been no report of him stopping there—not in her living memory, nor any history books, either.
No cats featuring at all? Surely this was a monumental miscarriage of feline justice! Smokey’s curiosity deepened with the mystery of her water bowl reflection, made even more vivid by this appearance of a huge ‘halo’ of the Harvest Moon around her head. As she tried to absorb the mystique of the occasion, giving little concentration on the current job of drinking, a splash of water missed her mouth, and flicked into the air before her nose. In the neardaylight brightness, the droplet flashed like a diamond. - 52 -
