You remember, don’t you, the story about the pig farmer whose wife kept complaining about her small house? The farmer’s solution was to bring inside a pig each night until the house was so crowded with swine that there was no room to turn sideways. Then the farmer removed all the pigs and his wife found the house quite spacious.

My wife has modified for her own purposes the farmer’s approach. During my extended absences from New Orleans to work at this newspaper, she keeps allowing more damncats inside of our house.

There’s a hierarchy in the damncat colony here. Cookout Kitty is head damncat. He came with the house when we moved here in 1998. Since then we acquired Stella from Pope and Oreo. Each of the two latter came with their own story. In the damncat hierarchy they were the inside/outside damncats, tame pets who come and go as suits them. The rest of the damncats here are strictly outside ferals. Their census ebbs and flows. We’ve caught some in traps but it seems like there’s always a kitten or two scurrying through our shed or the neighbors’ sheds and outbuildings clustered in these close, narrow back yards.

Lately, Lulu and Oscar have been elevated to the status of inside/outside damncats. They are the bird lady’s revenge.

We dubbed one of our neighbor’s daughters the bird lady after my wife clashed with her over a pet she abandoned next door in the year following Katrina. Like many in post-storm New Orleans, the bird lady did not feel so good mentally. She, her children and animals bounced in and out of the house next door that her mother abandoned after the storm, never yet to return. The animals included a Cockatoo. She left the exotic bird on a screen back porch. Someone came by occasionally to feed the bird, but as the cool weather of late 2006 returned to New Orleans, no one made a move to relocate the tropical creature to warmer quarters.

Frustrated in our attempts to contact other family members about the bird’s plight, we finally contacted the Louisiana SPCA. Their representative’s visit to the site happened to coincide with one of bird lady’s rare appearances there. He informed her of the animal cruelty prohibitions she had violated. The bird lady was not too happy at having had her hand called. As she strode to her car with the cage carrying the poor bird, she uttered at Rosemary, among descriptions of conjugal relations with cousins and siblings, an oath of revenge.

Revenge, as it turned out, were the damncats that we named Oscar and Lulu. They were among the other animals that bird lady brought with her. When bird lady made her dramatic departure, she left the two damncats.

Of course, Rosemary started feeding them. First it was under the fence, but soon they had made their way into our yard. Not long after, Rosemary started bringing them inside on cool nights. Then, … you know how that goes with damncats.

Lulu is a neutered female with green eyes big and out of proportion to she small face. She has turned out to be fascinated with water in the bowl placed on the kitchen floor for damncat consumption. Each night she paws the bowl sufficiently to spill most of the water onto the floor so that she can play in it as it rolls downhill to the other side of the kitchen. (Remember, this is an old, New Orleans house. Level floors? Hah!). So far, our only attempt to correct her behavior has been a heavier bowl. She still manages to knock enough water on the floor to entertain herself, pawing at the wave’s leading edge as it flows toward the kitchen sink.

Oscar, a large, neutered male, has issues. He cannot accept that his status as an inside/outside damncat is secure and not dependent on attacking Oreo or Stella from Pope and running them outside.

The upshot is Rosemary’s twist on the lesson of the wise pig farmer. If she keeps adding damncats to this house, I’ll finally come to the conclusion that there’s no room for me.