I dreamed my whole extended family was invited to New Orleans to stay in the St. Charles mansion of a friend's rich aunt and uncle. The couple was elderly and eccentric and had all sorts of strange rules such as, tapping the the doormat three times with your right foot before entering the house or buttering your toast starting from the left side. When the accommodations are free, huge, beautiful and in New Orleans, you're not going to mind a few strange rules. Throw in the mix my loud, dysfunctional family and you have a zany recipe for disaster.
Within a day, it was evident that all the affluent neighbors of the couple didn't like us. They kept having their servants wear large tribal masks, stand on the lawn and yell in their Jamaican accents,"Go home! Go back to Oklahoma." Despite their best efforts, we didn't leave and truthfully didn't see much of anything in New Orleans except that house.
One evening after dinner, we all walked out onto the huge wraparound porch to find every stray cat in the neighborhood had been found and dropped on our lawn as an incentive to leave. Ha! They didn't know a crazy cat lady was in the house. I along with Seth, his pal Ayden and my granddaughters Aaliyah and Maya, began to groom and transform the smelly cats into the beautiful creatures they were intended to be. During this whole extreme makeover, my sister, Linda, was running around behind us yelling dire warnings of histoplasmosis. However, even she can't resist a cute kitten. The neighbors, seeing that they couldn't get get rid of us, gave up.
It was just us, the eccentric couple, and the cats living a most blissful existence -until the couple's disapproving children came back from their vacation in Miami and told us to take ourselves and our disgusting cats out of their parent's house! We did. After dropping the lovely kittens off at an animal shelter, and taking a few we couldn't resist for ourselves, we headed home.
