melva.

She lived in conditions resembling those of the Beales of Grey Gardens in more ways than one. Yes, her abode was more shack-like than palatial, but she boasted thickets of greenery just as dense and on far less acreage. The question of her greatest achievement in this little slice of heaven boiled down to one of two things: either the world-record contending per capita number of cats OR the smell emanating therefrom. Melva lived a charmed life in her glory days. She, the master of her kitty kingdom. The cats, her willful minions.

Having been previously committed by the state and released, Melva was certifiably crazy. She often called the police on her only neighbors (my grandparents) with reports that ranged from cat homicide to sending a plague of ants on her house. Never you mind the fact that a dilapidated hut filled with hundreds of cats is bound to produce a dead one now and again without help or that piles of meat scraps covered in cat urine might attract critters of the insect variety. Clearly, the neighbors were behind it all.

She was a filthy human being who neither I nor anyone I know ever encountered in a state worth smelling. She hitchhiked her way into town every so often, which I am sure proved to be a very difficult venture. On the occasions authorities came to escort her to jail or the looney bin, they lined their back seats with garbage bags. For a regular highwaygoer to allow her in their vehicle without the aid of large sheets of plastic liner is either saintly or fucking insane. But alas, she made it into town to load up on cat food and Spam on a regular basis.

During the summer, the 120 degree sun reached the Melva compound high on its hilltop perch before anyone else in town and continued to roast it long after night had fallen. Days such as these turned her jungle into a rotting pile of trees, her cats into a festering pile of bodies, and consequently, their waste into a lovely accscent (accent + scent ?) fully capable of singeing off ones nose hairs. None of which brought Melva down, of course. In retaliation, she dumped a couple bags of dollar store catfood onto the floor of her home and hunkered down until the sun crept behind the mountains. Then, she came alive. At first a trickle, then a stream of water flowed down from the forest on the hill every summer night. Without visual affirmation of the water's source, it was easy to assume she was watering the trees, but some moonlight and a little stroll past the place illuminated the whole situation. Wallowing in a manmade mud-hole, Melva lay surrounded by an ever present feline crowd. She covered herself in wet earth and cooled off the way any sane desert creature would. Perfectly content. In the nude...

Then there were times Melva came out unannounced to, without rhyme or reason, either make pleasant conversation or scream obscenities as people walked the steps up to the neighboring house. During one such surprise visit, Melva spoke three words that forever changed the way I thought of her.

"Hey Kent, uhhhh, what are you guys doing tonight?", she squealed in a voice far too cartoonish for her 400-plus pound frame.

"Just having dinner, Melva.", he replied.

"Must be nice."