Farewell To The Cat That Liked Nobody
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
I’m happy to get to report that I enjoyed a lovely supper at Courthouse Cafe a week or so ago. The heat hanging over Water Valley that evening was beyond measurement, but inside Courthouse Cafe the temps were cool and comfortable. I speak for the customers, of course, not the cooks. They may have a different story to tell!
I enjoyed a chicken salad and a cold High Noon Peach. My husband got a club sandwich and a cold Miller Lite. The service was very friendly. There were several groups of people seated on the plant-filled patio out front. Courthouse Cafe owner, Justin, has built an absolute tropical oasis out front! Whatever his vision was for that patio, surely the reality surpassed it. It’s like seeing a dreamy mirage as you walk across a desolate, scorched parking lot. Courthouse Cafe has really embraced the power of the plant in terms of ambiance and it’s inspired me to do more of that at my Main Street studio.
In other Water Valley streetscape news this week, I fell down on Main Street. For the first time in my 23 years of walking and running the street of this ol’ town, I tripped past the tipping point. The irony that this happened directly after we got a mile of strategically placed ramps to make walking easier is not lost on me.
I tripped on the broken sidewalk at the corner of Lafayette and Main, falling off of the sidewalk and into the road below. This very unfairly added an extra five or six inches of falling. I skinned my left knee and twisted my right ankle. I would have preferred all the injuries stay on one extremity because the dual-sided situation was complicated to maneuver.
The injuries weren’t so bad. I was over it in a few days. It was the getting up after the fall that proved to be the most challenging aspect of the whole ordeal. I have never felt more 49 years old than the moment after I fell and I literally could not figure out how to get up again. I just sat there, very mildly injured and totally unsure which body part was capable of handling the task of helping me out.
Lastly, my cat Janet went missing a couple of weeks ago. I’ve mentioned her a few times in this column over the years. I got her about 10 years ago when Jacki Clevenger showed up at our Knit Club with a tiny kitten she found living in the dumpster behind the Piggly Wiggly.
Janet was a gray fluffball that looked like a tiny storm cloud, an aesthetic that was exemplary of her personality. Janet and I formed a one-sided friendship (I liked Janet, Janet liked nobody) that I cherish very much. Janet lived any cat’s dream life, gatekeeping Wood Street from her perch in the middle of the road, butchering wild rabbits with such precision that Jacques Pepin would feel inadequate and befriending a raccoon just as an exercise in societal rebellion and spite. I tried to stop this coupling but she insisted. She slapped my dog Oscar clean in the face every time he walked into or out of the backdoor, which means she was slapping a dog several times a day. Whatever happened to Janet, I take comfort in knowing that she always did what she loved!
