Flaming kitty

And I don’t mean gay. This afternoon I was sitting on my couch, watching Lifetime television, enjoying all my lit, fragrant candles, like I do every day. None of them are within kitty reach, and anyway, the kitties know better. Uh huh. I was thinking about taking a nap because I was so comfy when I noticed a horrible smell. The smell of burning…what? Oh yes, burning hair (don’t ask me why I recognize that smell)…or more like…FUR. Uh oh. That only meant one thing – a kitty had violated the candle rule. I jumped up as Piper jumped onto my coffee table, swishing her tail, her enormous, fluffy tail, and that’s when I realized THAT’s where the smell was coming from. I grabbed her tail and sure enough, there were the telltale ashes in about a 3-inch area on the underside. The curly, acrid, flaky ashes. A Lot of them. She was fine – I’m sure she didn’t even know it happened – and the fire was apparently out. That’s why it’s good to have fluffy kitties, so if they catch on fire they don’t even know. Uh huh. But the smell was so bad I had to get up and check the room and make sure she hadn’t caught anything else on fire. Everything was fine but I blew out the candles. When things had settled down again, I started thinking how and why did the fire go out by itself? Was it because she swished her tail so fast it blew out? Or did her leaping off the bar and running to the coffee table put it out? And how lucky was I that she didn’t literally burst into flames, or make my house do so? And yes, this has happened before, but not in a long time –I thought we were past burning kitties. When Jess was a kitten, he used to always have tiny, curled whiskers/eyebrows because he would lean in to smell a candle and it would curl his hair. He, however, eventually learned his lesson. And here it is, the much-anticipated punchline:

Some of us have to be burned over and over again to learn a lesson -- not everyone gets it the first time.