May and my cats

So today is the last day of April. It’s weird to think that tomorrow, of all days, will be May; where did the other months go in the year?

May is perhaps my favorite month. It is hot enough that I can go outside in shorts and no one will question it, but it isn’t so hot that the sun bakes your skin clean through to the bone, making your blood boil (or, at least, that’s how my summers go).

Plus, all the flowers are blooming or will soon be blooming. May is the month where the snow storms and freezing nights end. Where cakes are baked with frilly designs in the local bakery, the displays flourishing to life.

One thing that I love to do is to lay a quilt over the fresh green grass in our front yard and take to writing on a notebook, scribbling away at different worlds and characters. There is something comfortable about hammering out other people's lives and not your own, but I'm not sure quite what it is. 

This afternoon I went outside and sat under the shade of our big maple tree and watched as my two cats, Ollie and Peaches, slept in the grass a few feet away in a big jumble. Sometimes they'd get up and play with each other, and then settle back down again. 

Ollie and Peaches are both litter mates; Ollie is creme colored and has long, smooth hair. He prefers to act like a huge ragdoll when you hold him. Because I don't own a camera, he looks about like this:

  

Peaches is a little less beautiful, and also friendly. She is a short-haired tabby cat. She likes to sun herself in my bedroom window on the dresser, and so I keep a cat bed for her there. She got her name from when she was a kitten: when my little sister was left her oatmeal out on the table one time, she returned about a half-hour later to find that the cat was lapping the cream out of the bowl! Because cream didn't suit her very well (she has a temperament like sandpaper), we decided to call her Peaches.

She looks, at times, like this:

  

 Ollie and Peaches stay inside most of the time, but on the rare occasion that they go outside with me, they like to tackle on the lawn. I suppose another good thing about May is that they are both out running off some of their winter pudge.