Sleeper

Pets are good for a heart-warming snuggle when you want to thread all the world through the backyard chipper, for sharing their body heat when you stay in to watch a movie on a cold winter’s night, and for the destruction of your Great-aunt Betsy’s heirloom comforter. 

If you make your selection carefully and pick a dog or cat with say, claws and fur, you’ll find they are capable of widespread mayhem and do not limit themselves to the linens.

Take my Karastan, for instance, and you are welcome to take it if you have a vacuum with enough force to suck Superman from flight.  This rug, when blue, coordinates all the colors in my living room with the quiet confidence of a designer’s touch.  However, it is only blue on alternate full moons after the third Tuesday following the equinox.  Any other time it is a cunning mixture of yellow Labrador and calico housecat, which, in my experience, coordinates with nothing at all. 

 

On the positive side, I can track anyone in the house by their footprints through the fur.

Lately, I’ve given up on grooming the carpet in favor of an all-out effort on the couch.  It’s a sleeper couch in the true sense of the word. I secured it for the unlikely price of “I can afford it” from a local consignment shop.  It doesn’t fold out into a clever but uncomfortable shape that’s supposed to be a bed, but is the sort of couch that pulls you into the depths of its cushions like grandmother snuggling you in her arms and lulling you to sleep even when you’re supposed to be occupied with something important like watching Oprah.

Add one Diva Dachshund.

As a member of the privileged set, Lady Lucy views the couch as her personal domain.  She polices the boundaries and attendant pillows with vigor and errant claws, producing pulls and loops in the loose weave suitable for making Velcro or hanging myself. In a flash of brilliance, I solved the problem by cutting the loose strings.  And discovered an important fact.

Looseweave fibers are not much for teamwork.  Now the couch is unraveling at the rate of speed usually reserved for mating porpoises. 

In this case, I’m afraid we’re faced with long division instead of multiplication.

I hate to see the after-math.