Auspicious Junior

A couple of weeks ago, a neighbor stopped Deegii and asked her if she could bring one of our cats over to her house to “play with” for a little while. Deegii passed the request on to me. Worried I didn’t understand what she told me, I asked Terra to translate. Terra explained it just the way I had heard it, and I immediately said no. I couldn’t wrap my head around why a neighbor we had hardly spoken to in years wanted the company of one of our cats. Deegii explained that they were selling their house, and someone had told them they needed to play with a cat in the house for it to sell.
I mulled it over that day. I thought maybe it was an odd set of instructions from a shaman. I felt bad that they were at the point in the real estate process where they had to resort to following wacky advice, so I decided to bring a cat over. Now, the question was: which cat?

George is the solid and sound one. Junior is the wild card. Both were pretty lucky as far as cats go – both were strays we took in, but Junior was luckier because we kept him despite how annoying he was. There was also the “playing” to factor in. I had no idea what that would entail, but Junior was definitely the more playful cat at not even a year old.

The issue was settled when Junior ended up being the only cat around when Terra was home from school, and we were ready to go over. We got him into his walking harness, which he hates, and tried to walk him over. Carrying him over worked a lot better. As we got out of the yard, I set him down to see if he would walk and he launched into insane acrobatics, trying to slip out of his harness. He was nervous about walking past the house with the Night Dog (he spends the daytime tied up behind the house and nights loose in the yard barking at every living thing that passes his gate). He especially didn’t want to walk into the neighbor’s yard.

The neighbor came out when she heard us at the gate and got to witness another acrobatic tantrum. I worried about the first impression Junior was making. Instead of having my arms shredded, I picked Junior up by the scruff of the neck and carried him in. The entryway was small and crowded with shoes, boxes, and small containers. Once Junior was through the door, I set him down to see if he’d walk on his own. He stayed low to the ground but seemed okay with where we were. I handed the leash off to Terra but went ahead and carried him further. Our neighbor’s husband was reclining on the couch, watching TV. He ignored us as his wife guided us toward their spiral staircase. The stairwell was filled with potting soil, starter pots, and seed packets. I wondered if she was going to get things started in her greenhouses outside while she was preparing to sell the house and move. That didn’t feel like a move someone would make when they were getting ready to move.

Upstairs was a floorplan I couldn’t make sense of. There were two large rooms with a dividing wall, a mattress on the floor in the larger room and a Buddhist altar in the smaller room. Off the hallway were three more rooms, only one with a door – presumably, a bathroom. Those rooms were filled with boxes and belongings too large to fit in boxes. One of Terra’s classmates used to live there with his parents and grandparents, and it looked like a lot of the clutter was stuff he and his family had left behind when they moved to Ulaanbaatar. In the summer, we’d see him standing in the open second-floor window. I always wondered if it was meant to be opened that way, like a door. If it were our house, I would have put a terrace over the two-car garage right below those windows.

Junior quietly and carefully explored the second floor, with Terra holding his leash. She was asked to bring him into the room with the altar. He crept onto the thick white rug in the center of the room and we knelt off to its side. With our hands on our thighs, palms up and open, we were quiet as the homeowner murmured a mantra, rolling prayer beads between her fingers, glancing down at Junior with a smile and hope in her eyes. Junior lay flat on his belly for a moment but then got back up into a crawl to explore the other rooms. As he made his way back to the spiral staircase, he gave us our opening to excuse ourselves and head back home. I picked him up and carried him back downstairs. We quickly put our shoes on and said goodbye. Once we were back on our small side street, we set Junior down. He still resented the leash and wouldn’t walk with us, so we carried him back into our yard to take his halter off. He shook off his annoyance and galloped straight to his favorite spot to roll in the dirt.

A few days later, I told my Mongolian teacher about our goodwill excursion. She chuckled and told me that the cat visit to help sell a house was a Russian superstition. She said sometimes cats are put in an empty house to stay the night to chase out evil spirits and usher in good ones. Cats are also supposed to bring good fortune to a newly owned home and are helpful for selling a home as well. She guessed that the neighbor was older, which means she would have grown up with some knowledge of Russian superstitions. This information made me feel better about the visit. Somehow, it was more reassuring that she had asked for the cat visit because of a cultural belief and not as something prescribed by a shaman.

The week after our visit, I spotted a Facebook post advertising the house for sale. I hope that Junior was able to bring some good fortune their way.