The Day I was a Kitten

One of my happiest early memories involves ‘fooling’ my mom.

One day when I was 4 or 5, I was playing outside, and I heard my mother doing laundry in the basement. I crept up to the edge of the basement window, careful to stay out of sight, and began making plaintive kitten sounds.

From the basement, I heard my mother say, “Oh! That sounds like a kitten outside! It must be very thirsty. I will get a saucer of milk and put it on the ground.”

Delighted, I scurried to hide around the back of the house. I peeked around the corner in time to see my mother carefully placing a saucer of milk on the ground outside the basement window. She called, “Here, kitty, kitty!” a few times and then said, “Oh well. Maybe the kitten will return if I go back inside.”

As soon as she left, I crept up to the window again. I tried to lap the milk from the saucer with my tongue as I’d seen cats do, but it turned out to be a lot harder than it looks! Finally, I gave up being a cat and picked up the saucer and drank the sweet, cold milk. Right then, I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life!

I think I knew, even then, that my mother hadn’t really been fooled in the slightest.

But for that, I loved her all the more.

Mom, you’re my hero!

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