Trapped 2

Here is the full story on the closet incident which happened a few days ago. On Wednesday evening, I was putting together my outfit for the next day's special occasion at school. Behind the closed closet doors I was rummaging through boxes of shoes and hanging dresses. These rustling sounds were driving the younger cats wild. I could hear them outside the closet chirping and really wanting to get in.

The closet doors are two sliding mirrors on tracks. When we moved in nine years ago, the cats were fascinated by the closet. They liked to break in and hide among the shoe boxes. I cut two dowel rods to size and put them in the tracks to keep the doors from being pried open. We can easily kick the stick out of the way and get in, but the cats didn't know how to move the sticks. We had stopped needing to block the doors several years ago, but then Daisy came and the closet was breached again. She jumped on all the shelves and tossed off jewelry boxes and sweaters. She opened the bottom drawer of the chest and pulled my pajamas out onto the floor. I foraged in the back of the closet and found the old sticks and deployed them in the tracks.

Wednesday night as I was going through boxes of shoes, I could hear Nick and Daisy scuffling outside the closet. In the commotion, they must have knocked the stick back up onto the track. When I was ready to exit the closet, the door wouldn't budge. Thinking quickly, I realized that my husband was downstairs and could release me from the closet, but he had the TV on and wouldn't hear me easily from upstairs. I opened the laundry trapdoor in the corner of the closet and called his name. After calling about four times, I knocked on the floor, and that got his attention. We were both laughing as he moved the stick and set me free.

We speculated about the sound of a cat laughing up its pajama sleeves.

If the cats trap me in the closet again, all is not lost if I am at home alone. I could have gotten out of the less used if the two doors easily from the inside.