…So anyway, this is what I was trying to tell you happened when I was making the chili. The Hub was downstairs doing laundry. The dog was at his regular station lying down between the birdcages with a sight line to the kitchen in case anything good fell onto the floor. He was drowsing, but every time I opened the refrigerator his wrinkley old eyebrows went up.

The pair-a-tweeters were in their cage, sitting beak to beak, speaking parakeet to each other. They really do look like they are whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears. Parakeets have ears, of course, they’re just really tiny holes in their heads covered with feathers....

Kendi was on her swing between the kitchen and the dining room reducing one of her wooden toys to match sticks and throwing them all over the floor. You can’t fight thousands of years of evolution in a first generation tame bird: parrots niche in the ecosystem is to seed and fertilize the forest floors where they live. There would be no point in explaining to Kendi that the dining room is not the Congo. Besides, we have brooms in civilization.

“Peek-a-bird!” she’d call out from time to time, through her general chatter, just to make sure I knew she was still there.

“Hello” I’d answer, about 85% of the time (alternating with “Peek-a-bird”) since I’m trying to teach her the word “hello”.

She’s getting it, too. She’s gotten from two syllables of “awk-awk” in the kind-of-sort-of high-low of my speech pattern to something that sounds a lot like “Squawk-Lo!” When the Squawk-Lo comes out really clearly, at least the “lo” part, I run around very excitedly praising her, telling her she’s a smart bird, etc and she fluffs her feathers proudly.

All of the sudden I heard, very clearly “Meow”. This wasn’t surprising, since we do, after all, have a cat now. And she is a VERY vocal cat. She is always trying to tell us something. But when any of the birds are out of their cages, and Cleopatra, the cat, is upstairs, I make sure I know where she is.

So, I began looking for the cat. And searching and searching. The pair-a-tweeters and Kendi were watching curiously, to see what I was looking for. The dog just looked around.

But the cat was not upstairs. The cat, it turned out, was downstairs in the laundry room with the door closed. She had been the whole time.

I came back upstairs. “Okay. Who said ‘meow’?” I asked.

Everybody looked at me. I quickly ruled out the dog. “Did you guys meow?” I asked the pair-a-tweeters. They seemed a likely suspect actually, since it sounded like the cat had been right under their cage. They clung to the side of their cage and looked confused. But they always look confused- they’re parakeets.

I don’t think it was Kendi, because I’ve never heard her say anything similar to “meow” before. But I don’t know. Parakeets do have a tremendous ability to mimic. Maybe one of them is not fully consumed by their relationship and has decided to take up a hobby.

Either way, when you can’t even count on having the expected sound come out of the appropriate animal it adds a whole new level of complexity to your life.

And I could kind of do without that, ya know?