By Gretchen Leigh
I put off grocery shopping last week because, well, I didn’t want to go. I had to make an emergency run on Monday because we ran out of paper towels over the weekend. Oh the horror of it all. My family was beside themselves over it. You would have thought we were out of peanut butter; it was that bad. To further add to the crisis, they all realized our lack within the same hour and were frantic. They huddled together at one end of the house, with shirts wrapped around their heads, dirt smeared on their faces like the lost boys in Peter Pan. OK, maybe not that extreme, but still. Their frenzy was initiated by the animals’ telepathic communications, “They are out of paper towels. This is the moment we’ve prepared for. Everybody, take your places, initiate operation vomit. NOW!” Even the dog was involved, which is unusual, because she hates the cats and it doesn’t seem she’d gang up on her people with a cat. But she did.
People in the house screamed, “What do we do? How do we pick up the messes without paper towels?”
Really people. Paper towels were not invented until 1907 and I’m sure they were a luxury rather than a household necessity for many years. I don’t even remember paper towels being a thing we had in my childhood home. Surely animals threw up in the olden days, too. Although, I suppose the dirt floors in our caves made it more conducive to just shoving it out the door. Sorry this is so graphic, but if you have animals, I’m sure you can relate. So seriously, I had to tell them how to deal with it: just get a rag, pick it up, dump the chunks into the garbage can, and put the rag into the laundry. They don’t even do the laundry; They’ll probably live to talk about it.
The cat barfed four times. Of course, that was probably because my husband was chasing her through the house. She prefers to assert herself within hearing distance, but out of range of any other physical body. He had his work cut out for him. You would think my husband would have learned after one incident when she started heaving in the living room and he chased her around trying to get her to do her business on the linoleum in the kitchen. After a few laps, with her gagging the whole time, she leaped over the couch and projectile vomited across the whole thing.
I’m always yelling at him to just leave her alone and let her finish before he gets so irritated. Then it’s one big mess instead of several small ones. Oh and by the way, she throws up mostly around my husband because he makes the biggest deal over it. She’s a cat, she enjoys drama.
This weekend though, everyone was in a panic; it was mass hysteria, though short lived. I did not, however, get out of my chair and take care of any of it myself. I was in disbelief that none of them knew what to do without paper towels. Let’s just hope there aren’t any real emergencies in our home; at least not when I’m not around to tell them what to do. Even though I felt like it was a good lesson for them all to learn how to rough it in the wild (snort), I went to the store the next day anyway. I was out of coffee. Now that is a real crisis.
Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. You can read more of her writing and her daily blog on her website livingwithgleigh.com, on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh.”or follow her on Twitter @livewithgleigh. Her column is available every week at maplevalleyreporter.com under the Lifestyles section.
