𝕮𝖗𝖊𝖊𝖕𝖞𝖕𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕺𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖎𝖓𝖘/𝕾𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖘

Boxes

I spent the summer before my first year of elementary school learning how to climb trees. There was one particular pine tree right outside my house that seemed almost designed for me. It had branches that were so low I could easily grab them without a boost, and for the first couple days after I first learned how to pull myself up I would just sit on the lowest branch, dangling my feet. The tree was outside our back fence and was easily visible from the kitchen window which was just above the sink. Before too long my mother and I developed a routine where I would go play on the tree when she washed the dishes because she could easily see me while she did other things.

As the summer passed my abilities grew and before too long I was climbing fairly high. As the tree got taller its branches not only got thinner but more widely-spaced and so I eventually reached a point where I couldn't actually climb any higher, and so the game had to change; I began to concentrate on speed, and in the end I could reach my highest branch in 25 seconds.

I got too confident and one afternoon I tried to step from a branch before I had firmly grasped the next one. I fell about 20 feet and broke my arm really badly in two places. My mom was running toward me yelling and I remember her sounding like she was underwater – I don't remember what she said but I do remember being surprised by just how white my bone was.

I was going to start Kindergarten with a cast and wouldn't even have any friends to sign it. My mom must have felt terrible because the day before I started school she brought home a kitten. He was just a baby and was striped with tan and white. As soon as she put him down he crawled into an empty case of soda that was sitting on the floor. I named him Boxes.

Boxes was only an outside cat when he escaped. My mom had him declawed so he wouldn't destroy the furniture, so as a result we did our best to keep him inside. He'd get out every now and then, and we'd find him somewhere in the backyard chasing some kind of bug or lizard, though he could hardly ever catch one because he had no front claws. He was pretty evasive, but we'd always catch him and carry him back inside. He'd scramble to look back over my shoulder – I told my mom that it was because he was planning his strategy for next time. Once inside we'd give him some tuna fish, and he came to learn what the sound of the can-opener might signal; he'd come running whenever he heard it.

This conditioning came in handy later because toward the end of our time in that house Boxes would get out much more often and would run under the house into the crawlspace where neither of us wanted to follow because it was cramped and probably crawling with bugs and rodents. Ingeniously, my mom thought to hook the can-opener to an extension cord out back and run it right outside the hole that Boxes had gone through. Eventually he would emerge with his loud meows, looking excited by the sound and then horrified at how we could run such a cruel ruse on him – a can-opener with no tuna made no sense to Boxes.

The last time he escaped to under the house was actually our last day in it. My mom had put the house on the market and we had begun packing our things. We didn't have much, and we stretched the packing out a while, though I had already packed up all my clothes at my mom's request – my mom could tell I was really sad about moving and wanted the transition to be smooth for me, and I guess she thought that having my clothes in the box would reinforce the idea that we were moving but things wouldn't change that much. When Boxes got out as we were loading some things into the moving van my mom cursed because she had already packed the can opener and wasn't sure where it was. I pretended to go look for it so I wouldn't have to go under the house, and my mom (probably completely aware of my little scam) moved one of the panels and crawled in. She came out with Boxes pretty quickly and seemed pretty unnerved, which made me feel even better about getting out of it. My mom made some phone calls while I packed a little more, and then she came into my room and told me that she had spoken to the realtor and we were going to start moving into the other house that day. She said it like it was excellent news, but I had thought we had more time in the house – she originally said that we weren't moving until the end of the next week and it was only Tuesday. What's more, we weren't completely finished packing, but my mom said sometimes it was just easier to replace things than pack them and haul them all over the city. I didn't even get to grab the rest of my boxed clothes. I asked if I could call Josh to say bye, but she said that we could just call him from our new house. We left in the moving van.