I need to buy a garden hose. It was a week ago that I needed to wash off the screen off of a fan which we have had for a long time. The fan’s screen needed to be washed because it had pink paint all over it. The fan had pink paint all over it because it had last been used to circulate air in the garage when I was spray painting Anna’s desk, which had previously been Jennifer’s childhood desk, made for her by her grandfather. I can’t answer why I thought it was a good idea to have air circulating wildly in the garage while I was painting. Anyway, the fan was therefore pink and in need of a good washing.

The garden hose, which we keep reeled up in the front yard, spends a lot of time in the sun, inasmuch as it is on the south side of a house in San Diego. Sun is apparently very bad for hoses when presented in large quantities, and thus the hose was in very bad shape at the time I used it to clean the fan. It didn’t really appear to be in such bad shape at first, and surely it functioned in a hose-like manner for as long as I needed it to clean the fan. I had brought Tara out into the garage with me while I cleaned the fan; Jennifer and Anna were out on some sort of errand at the time. After I was done spraying down the removable parts of the fan, and cleaning by hand those that were not, I brought Tara inside to feed her lunch. After finishing lunch I kept hearing sort of a hissing noise which I discovered later was the water running. The water was running, of course, because the hose which I had left under pressure with the spray handle attached had ruptured and was now flooding the lawn.

It was nearly a week later when a coyote ate the neighbor’s cat. What, you say? Are you wondering why you’ve been reading about a fan and a garden hose, and suddenly there are coyotes eating cats? This pretty much sums up the feeling I had when I was awakened at two o’ clock in the morning by Jennifer. That I was awakened at 2:00am is, sadly, not a particularly notable event these days, but Jennifer is not usually the one doing the waking. She was standing at the side of the bed nervously asking if she should call the neighbor, because a coyote had just eaten their cat. Our neighbors have at least one cat, and really, the only reason we know this is because they have a second story cat door to let the cat in and out of the house. From one of their upstairs windows, there is a little ramp that leads down to their patio cover, and from the patio cover the cat makes its way to the ground and back. From our breakfast nook we would occasionally see the cat climb up or down the ramp.

Our house could scarely be located in a more suburban part of San Diego. Being that as it may, there is little flat ground in San Diego, so neighborhoods are created by lopping off the tops of hills, leaving a plateau of concrete surrounded by canyons, like the one that is about 200 feet from our house. Coyotes live in these canyons, and apparently they’re hungry.

Moments before Jennifer woke me up, she had heard a thump which sounded as if was inside the house. Upon investigating, she heard a noise outside that sounded like a cat and a dog fighting; our motion-sensing front patio lights came on, so that when Jennifer looked out the window she had an excellent view of a coyote with the neighbor’s cat in its mouth. We have previously seen cats sitting on the wall that surrounds our front patio. I had thought cats might like the wall because the black bricks retain some of the day’s warmth in the evenings, and the wall provides a good vantage point to scope out the neighborhood. I may need to post a sign later, because it appears to be a really bad place for cats.

The next day we looked around the patio and the sidewalk that leads to our front door, C.S.I.-style, and determined that the cat became cornered at our front door, and the thump which originally captured Jennifer’s attention was the coyote striking the cat. A struggle then ensued, leaving a trail of blood and fur from our door, down the walk, and across the patio, where the predator and his catch were then seen by Jennifer.

Now you know why I need, soon, to buy a new hose.

She did call the neighbor and was surprised to find that he had in fact lost three previous cats to coyotes.