There is a new blanket on the bed and I would like it noted that nobody asked me.
The old one is still around — I saw it folded over the arm of the reading chair earlier, demoted, looking thin and a little betrayed if a blanket can look like anything, which I’ve decided it can. The new one arrived this evening in a flat plastic bag that she tore open with her teeth at one corner, which is not a sound I get to hear very often and which I therefore filed away as significant. It smelled, before it even touched the bed, like a place I’ve never been. Something closed-up. Something folded a long time. Not bad. Just old in a way that isn’t dust and isn’t dirt, more like the inside of somewhere that doesn’t get opened much.
I supervised the unfolding from the foot of the bed with my paws tucked under me, which is the position I use when I want it clearly understood that I am not going to help and also that nothing may proceed without my witness. She shook it out over the mattress and it made a heavy, soft sound landing, not the little snap the thin blanket makes. Bigger. Slower. It settled wrong at first, one corner hanging off the edge like it hadn’t been told where the bed ended, and she had to walk around and tug it twice before it agreed to lie flat.
I did not get on it right away. I want that understood too. A new object of this size, this color — a deep, brownish red I don’t think we’ve had in the room before — deserves a period of observation before anyone commits their whole body to it. I sat at the very edge and pressed one paw down into it experimentally. It gave more than the old blanket does. Sank under me in a way that felt less like fabric and more like something with actual depth to it, like I could disappear a little if I really leaned in.
The smell was the real work of the evening. I went over the whole surface of it methodically, corner to corner, the way you’d want a job like this done — nose down, working in careful overlapping passes so nothing gets missed. Under the closed-up smell there was something else, fainter, that I couldn’t place. Not her. Not me. Not the house at all, really. Some other room’s smell, riding along on the fabric like it hitched a lift and hadn’t noticed yet that it had arrived somewhere new. I sat with my nose pressed into one particular fold near the pillow for a long time trying to work it out and got nowhere, which is its own kind of unsatisfying, the smell equivalent of a word stuck on the tip of your tongue except I don’t have a tongue for words, I only have the sitting-and-frowning part.
She got into bed before I’d finished my inspection, which I resented on principle but let go of quickly because getting into bed pulled the blanket taut in a way that made a whole new set of ridges and valleys appear, and I am not the kind of cat who walks away from freshly revealed terrain. I picked my way up the slope of her legs and found a spot where the fabric folded twice over itself, thick as anything, and pressed down into it with both front paws, testing.
It held my weight differently than the old blanket does. Firmer, somehow, even though it’s softer — like it has more opinions about where I should end up. I kneaded at it for a while, which I do to blankets I’m deciding about, a kind of interview process, and it took the kneading well. Didn’t slide out from under my claws the way the thin one sometimes does. Stayed put. I respect a blanket that stays put.
She reached over at some point and ran her hand down my back and then flat against the new blanket beside me, comparing us maybe, or just enjoying having two warm things in reach, and said something about how it gets cold at night now, which I already knew because I’ve noticed her curling in tighter the last several evenings, less sprawl, more folding herself toward the middle of the bed. I hadn’t put together that the folding and the coldness were connected until she said it out loud, and even now I’m not sure I believe the coldness comes from outside rather than from her simply deciding to take up less space. But I filed it as a possibility.
By the time the lamp went off I had claimed the fold nearest her knee, which is thick enough there to feel like a small hill, and the closed-up smell had started to soften into something warmer just from my lying on it, my own smell working its way in the way it does with anything I stay on long enough. That’s the real test, in the end. Not whether I like a new thing right away. Whether it’s willing to start smelling like me.
It was. Give it another night or two and there won’t be any trace left of wherever it came from before this room.