The highlight of Easter weekend was watching my sister dip her toast in cat drool and eat it. She was fresh from a recent victory in the kitchen, having won a minor fight I started over why she would choose Sun-Maid raisin bread instead of the gorgeous cranberry-pecan pain au levain I'd bought that morning. Her road-weary, cranky mood was perhaps buoyed by this unusual turn of events (I usually win our fights, if only with sheer persistence) and she sat happily gabbing with relatives at the coffee table, her toast-filled hand casting crumbs with every gesticulation. Then Derkins, Aunt Cynthia's aging cat, jumped up on the table for a visit, staying only long enough to allow a viscous thread of drool to escape from one of the gaps in her malocclusion and form a small puddle just to the left of my sister's toast plate. Now, my sister loves cats—she has three and she calls them her “babies”—so I think she was probably trying to stand up for cats in general when, in response to our collective eeeewwww at the sight of this puddle, she dunked her toast in the drool and chewed it up with a smile. “Cats are the cleanest animals,” she said.
