Figures.

File under: What’s ours is OURS and what’s yours is OURS. (Actually, there is no such things as “yours”…nope…not anymore…)

Or perhaps they’re saving that for when the Trannies muscle in.

In case you were wondering. A crucial feature of being part of the NeverTrump residue is being incurably obtuse.

I guess instead of running out the door she must have jumped into the downstairs ash trap, which leads up to the ground floor air space, and then she couldn’t get back down the vertical trap.

A couple years back while dealing with my folks estate I spent some considerable number of fall and winter nights in my childhood home.

It’s one of those 4 bdrm two story, mid-sixties era, red bricked lower, aluminum sided upper, colonials with attached garage. You know the general type.

Anyway, knowing the lay of the land you can picture those 5ft wide, 3 flue brick chimney stacks that ran up the ourside wall of the subdivision’s family rooms, rising to a considerable height over the lower roof, where the upper story was set back 10 feet or so. Thus they rose against the sky like broad brick towers set at the ends of the houses.

One late night, for reasons I still am not sure of, I went into the master bedroom bath, and hearing a vague wail, opened the sliding window that overlooked the lower roof, thinking there might be something on it. There was not.

But just before closing the window I glanced at the house next door. The family room and garage end of that house faced the living room and dining room, and above , the master bedroom suite of the house I was in.

And there about 40 feet away, at the top of their broad tower-like chimney, outlined against the late fall night sky, and perched across at least 2 flues, was, it appearred, the form of a giant squat house cat. The sight was amusingly eerie, like a grammar school Halloween poster.

The thing saw me and seemed unperturbed, not scampering off. So I closed the window and forgot about it.

A few days later I saw the homeowners in the front yard.

I walked over to the lady and said, “Hey, thought you might like to know… Blah blah blah …might be a good idea to install a flue cap. We had to, to keep the cat from coming down the chimney”

The couple looked at each other, and she said, “It is not a cat, it is a racoon.”

I reacted with, “Oh man they are a nuisance they can get down the chimney, and set up on the smoke shelf; and then you have a real problem. Be careful they don’t get down the chimney”

“It has”

“Well then you have a real potential problem with making a fire .”

“We don’t use the fire place”

“But racoons are clever, they can pull up the damper flap and get down into the fire box, and then get through the spark screen into the house. It happened to my boss who had a rarely used basement fireplace.”

“He did, he lives there”

“The racoon? On the smoke shelf?

” No in the fireplace behind the glass screen doors”

They had a wild racoon living as some kind of damned quasi pet in the family room fireplace of their house. Separated from the couches and the TV, and the rest of the rooms of the house by a couple of tempered glass doors with no locking mechanism. Though apparently they had latched the handles together somehow.

They apparently fed it too …. tuna fish, or whatever.

At that I smiled and our conversation ended with pleasant nods.

I did not want to know more.

In the early ’90s I had a cat disappear on me once. I looked all over for her for 24 hours and couldn’t find her anywhere and was afraid she had strayed somehow, although she was usually a close-to-home kitty.

And then I started hearing very very faint meowing, and eventually tracked it down to the bedroom. My girlfriend or I had left the top drawer of the bureau open, the cat had jumped up into it and then crawled over the back into the drawer below, and then we had unknowingly shut the top drawer, trapping her. Most cats would have started screaming, but apparently she decided to wait most of a day and then just occasionally let out a tiny mew.