Stinky Shoes

Frank versus the flip-flop

                I’m embarrassed to say that we have stinky shoes at our house and lots of them.  Perhaps some of you can relate.  Even though there is a designated spot for shoes in the hallway, many of them end up resting where they were kicked off.  (With five cats, you don’t really think we have a clean, well-organized home, do you?)  The cats never bother the properly placed hallway shoes, but they figure any shoes scattered around the house are fair game. 

                Rather than being offended by the smell, the cats revel in it.   I still laugh when I picture Tigerlilly sticking her head so far into my husband’s tennis shoe that it got stuck.  She stumbled around the house blindly until it finally wobbled off.

                Frank treats the shoes as surrogate friends.  Like smelly buddies from the gym, he challenges them to a few rounds of Frank-style wrestling.  It starts by locking a shoe in a big bear hug, then using his back legs to kick box the bejeebers out of it.  To this day, I’ve never seen a shoe fight back, but you can see Frank imagining it doing all kinds of moves that he has to counter.  In the end, the shoe appears to be knocked out as the victorious Frank smugly walks away.

                Sometimes you can catch an inkling of what goes on in a cat’s head…not always…but sometimes….