I saw a lady come out of one of the trailers on my mail route the other day.

I saw her out of the corner of my eye when I stopped to put a piece of junk mail in her box.

A big cigarette was smoking her, and she looked at me suspiciously as she hurried to throw a large black bag of trash into the dumpster next to the trailers.

I thought to myself, “She looks just like a smoking cat scurrying around so suspicious of me…”

“She looks just like a big, feral, smokin’ cat.”

A big, feral, smokin’ cat.

Feral Smokin’ Cat.

I couldn’t get over myself…thinking up something like “smoking cat”.

That was so weird.

If I didn’t have a well-developed ability to “self-amuse”, my job could get kind of monotonous.

( We have two young roosters who roost for some reason on the porch outside our bedroom window.  One has a robust crow.  He’ll crow and crow at our neighbor’s security light….doesn’t matter how early in the morning it is. He’s pretty loud like you’d expect a rooster to be.  The other one has sort of a wheeze going on…like he’s whispering “yeah, that’s right…what he said.”  I think I’m going to go throw them both off the porch right now…)

There are so many smoking cats out on my route.

They’ll come out and look…like a cat looks out from the overgrown grass around an abandoned car and then darts away.  They’ll look through the screen door and then run out to get the mail when they think I can’t see them in my rear view mirror.

After five years of driving the route, a lot of them have gotten used to me…so we visit occasionally when they catch me at their boxes.

That feels like a real victory.

Some of these “smoking cats” are pretty nice people.  Shy…but pretty nice.

I guess that you can’t really judge a book by its cover all the time.

I’m not a big fan of smoking…it’s kind of an obnoxious habit…kind of intrusive.  I don’t want my health to be compromised because somebody enjoys doing something that damages their health.  It’s hard to get away from the smoke.

But I know some great people who smoke…so it’s not a huge deal to put up with it so I can enjoy their company.

I do enjoy their company more in between puffs, though.

We’re going to go get our passports this morning.

We’re going to go get our passports at the “smoke free” USPS facility in downtown Hendersonville.

They have a reputation for being “buggers” at the main office….the non-smoking version of rude smokin’ cats…so we’ll see how that goes.

Our secret weapon is a sweet little three-year old who can turn cranky, cranky, cranky at the drop of a hat.

It really encourages people to expedite when my little guy gets “cranked up” to maximum volume.

It’s a skill that I’m sure we’ll appreciate when they quickly process us and say, “OK….there you go.”

“Please….go.”