The Big Cat Nap

the hayloft.
    Flatface
—This great horned owl lives in the barn cupola. She irritates Pewter, but the cat realizes the bird could easily pick her up and carry her off.
    The Lutheran Cats
    Elocution
—She’s the oldest of the St. Luke’s cats and cares a lot about the “Rev,” as his friends sometimes call the Very Reverend Herbert Jones.
    Cazenovia
—This cat watches everybody and everything.
    Lucy Fur
—She’s the youngest of the kitties. While ever playful, she obeys her elders.

A red-shouldered hawk, tiny mouse in her talons, swooped in front of the 2007 Outback rolling along the wet country road. She landed in an old cherry tree covered in pink blossoms, which fluttered to the ground from the hawk’s light impact.
    “Will you look at that?” Miranda Hogendobber exclaimed from behind the Outback’s wheel, as she drove to the garden center over in Waynesboro.
    “Raptors fascinate me, but they scare me, too,” Harry Haristeen remarked. “Poor little mouse.”
    “There is that.” Miranda slowed for a sharp curve.
    Central Virginia, celebrating high spring, was also digging out from torrential rains over the weekend.
    Harry, forty and fit, and Miranda, late sixties and not advertising, had worked together for years at the old Crozet post office.
    When Miranda’s husband, George, died, Harry, fresh from Smith College, took his position as head of the P.O., never thinking the job would last nearly two decades. Miranda, despite her loss, showed up every day to help orient the young woman whom she’d known as a baby. Harry’s youth raised Miranda’s spirits. In mourning, it’s especially good to have a task. Over the years they became extremely close, almost a mother–daughter bond. Harry’s mother had died when Harry was in her early twenties.
    Noticing fields filled with the debris of the now-subsiding waters, Harry observed, “What a mess. Can’t turn out stock in that. You just don’t know what else is wrapped up in all those branches and twigs.”
    “Hey, there’s a plastic chair. Might look good in your yard.” Miranda smiled.
    “Well,” Harry drawled the word out, like the native Southerner she was.
    The younger woman, generous with her time and happy to feed anyone, could be tight with the buck. Miranda couldn’t resist teasing Harry about a free if ugly chair.
    “This is sure better than my 1961 Falcon,” the older woman said. “Initially I resisted the Outback’s fancy radio. I mean, this is a used car and had the Sirius capabilities, but I didn’t want to pay extra. How did I live without it?” Miranda mused, now a Subaru convert.
    “Regular cars can now do more than Mercedes or even Rolls from ten years ago. That’s what amazes me: the speed with which the technological developments of those high-end cars became commonplace in much-lower-priced vehicles. But I still love my old 1978 F-150 and you still drive your old Falcon. Hey, want me to wax it?”
    “Would you? What a lovely offer.”
    “You know how crazy I get with anything with an engine in it. I’ll clean the tires, refresh your dash. I’m a one-woman detailing operation.”
    Her eyebrows knitting together, Miranda said, “Uh-oh.”
    An odd pop, then a lurch, made holding the Outback on the road difficult.
    “Put on your flashers and brake.”
    They slid toward a narrow drainage ditch, and the air bags billowed up inside as the wheel dipped in the ditch. Miranda couldn’t see.
    If there was enough room, narrow drainage ditches, about one to two feet deep, paralleled the country roads. Occasionally, small culverts passed the runoff under farm driveways or sharp curves, moving the water, which could rise very quickly, away from the roads.
    Even without vision, Miranda was not one to panic. She brakedsmoothly, and the right side of the car dropped into the ditch. The car rocked a little.
    Asleep on the backseat, Harry’s two cats and dog rolled off.
    “Hey!”
Pewter, the rotund gray cat, howled.
    The tiger cat, Mrs. Murphy, and the corgi, Tee Tucker, scrambled back up on the seat.
    “No other cars,”
the dog noted.
    The tiger cat looked around.
“Right.”
    “I was asleep.”
Pewter hauled herself up to sit next to her friends.
    “We all were,”
Mrs. Murphy drily noted.
    “Well—I was more asleep.”
    Harry, already outside, having punctured the air bag with the penknife she always carried in her hip pocket, crouched down to look at the undercarriage. Then she walked to the right front side of